Acadia Realty Trust, in partnership with Washington Square Partners and later Extell Development, opened the retail component of City Point in 2017 on the former site of the demolished Albee Square Mall in Downtown Brooklyn, following a 99-year ground lease secured in 2007 and a project delayed for years by the 2008 financial crisis. The development sits at the intersection of Flatbush Avenue, Willoughby Street, Gold Street and Fulton Street, linking two of Brooklyn’s busiest retail corridors.
At roughly 675,000 sqft of retail space within a 1.8 million sqft mixed-use complex that includes residential towers reaching 57 stories, the property opened in phases through 2017: Century 21 in October 2016, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (New York City’s first) in November 2016, Target in January 2017, Trader Joe’s in June 2017, and the DeKalb Market Hall food hall, with roughly three dozen vendors including Katz’s Delicatessen, in the fall. Century 21 has since closed as part of the chain’s 2020 national bankruptcy, with Burlington now occupying a comparable department-store role at the property.
Alamo Drafthouse expanded its footprint in 2020, adding 25,000 sqft and doubling its screen count from the original seven. Pandora, Swarovski, lululemon, H&M and Primark, which occupies a four-floor store within the podium, carry fashion and accessories, with Sephora and Lids rounding out the specialty tenant base.
That “demolish a struggling downtown mall, replace it with a mixed-use, deliberately eclectic retail podium beneath residential towers” model, developed on municipally-owned land as part of the city’s 2004 Downtown Brooklyn rezoning plan, reflects how thoroughly urban, transit-rich sites like this one have shifted away from conventional single-format shopping centers toward vertically integrated retail-and-residential developments since the mid-2000s.
