The Whitestone Shopping Center Has New Owners. Here's What Stays Open and What the Plans Show.

The Whitestone Shopping Center was sold this summer for $56 million. The new owners' own paperwork shows the plaza didn't empty out all at once. It emptied one storefront at a time over roughly nine years. By July 2026, 73,199 of its 120,390 leasable square feet were vacant, or 60.8 percent, and the average vacancy had lasted five years.

The buyer is BTF Whitestone Realty LLC, an affiliate of BTF Capital, and the deal closed on July 24. Its first major filing wasn't a lease announcement. It was an application to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to clean up the soil under the building that housed Stephen's Dry Cleaners for decades. For anyone who uses the plaza off the Cross Island Parkway service road for groceries, banking or a haircut, that order matters. The proposed cleanup is the first step on the record, and it sits in a building where most of the storefronts are already empty.

The Stores That Left, and How Long Ago

Long Island Business News reported that the center sits on 9.26 acres at 153-15 to 153-49 Cross Island Parkway, with 28 stores in five buildings and a 27,457-square-foot Key Food as its anchor. LIBN described the property as less than 50 percent occupied. The state application puts vacancy higher, at about 60 percent.

The application includes a vacancy chart dated July 15, 2026, prepared by Schuckman Realty, which handled leasing for the previous owners. Ken Schuckman is also one of the managers of the buying company. Here is how long each former tenant's space had been empty as of that date.

Two patterns show up in the chart. First, the center lost both of its pharmacies. Rite Aid's 18,883 square feet is the largest empty space on the property, and it matches the top of the 767-to-18,883-square-foot range that LIBN cited from the leasing brochure. Second, the losses sped up toward the end. Four spaces went dark in the 13 months before the sale, and three of them were the kind of places people sit down in or come back to every few weeks: a restaurant, a diner and a hair salon.

The same chart lists three more departures coming. T-Mobile is marked "moving out." Pizza Chef, on a month-to-month lease, is also marked "moving out." New York Sports Clubs, in the center's largest non-grocery space at 20,938 square feet, is listed as "closing 12-26-26" with the word "bankruptcy" beside it. Both businesses still list their Whitestone locations online. The New York Sports Clubs Whitestone page shows 153-37 Cross Island Parkway with hours and enrollment links. Pizza Chef's website still offers online ordering for its Whitestone shop. For now, both are open, and the owners' filing lists both as leaving.

The Stores Built Around Errands Stayed

Here is what was still operating in July, according to the same chart: Chase, Webster Bank, a liquor store, Key Food, an optometrist, Sammy's Barber and Angel Tips. Webster is listed as downsizing. Sammy's Barber and Angel Tips are both marked for renewal.

These are the businesses tied to routines that can't move online: weekly groceries, a bank branch, a haircut, a nail appointment, an eye exam.

The buyers know their foundation. In its report on the sale, LIBN quoted Schuckman on why they bought: "It has the location, the parking, and the daily traffic that retailers want, and almost nothing competes with it." His co-investor, Aaron Malinsky, told the outlet that "well-located, supermarket-anchored real estate in supply-constrained New York City submarkets is very difficult to replace." The new owners have said the center has more than 500 free surface parking spaces. They also named Key Food, JPMorgan Chase, Webster Bank and Angel Tips as tenants that will stay open while work moves in phases around them.

The strategy is to rebuild the plaza around the supermarket and parking that kept people coming during the vacant years, and then lease the empty space to "national and regional retailers, restaurants, and service tenants that complement the grocery anchor." In their August 3 announcement, the owners said tenant announcements would come once leases were signed, and that announcement named no new tenants.

The Proposed Dig Under Building E

The empty storefronts that are hardest to fill are in Building E. That's the eastern strip, with 13 small tenant spaces, nine of them vacant. Stephen's Dry Cleaners occupied space E-12 there from at least 1985 and used chlorinated solvents, including tetrachloroethylene, also known as PCE, from 1996 until it moved out in 2024. The four businesses still open in Building E as of July were the optometrist, Sammy's Barber, Pizza Chef and Angel Tips.

The application to DEC's Brownfield Cleanup Program covers about 0.918 acres, the whole of Building E. The application is at the investigation stage, and its proposed work in Building E is physically heavy:

1. Shore up Building E with steel bracing on its walls and ceiling.
2. Remove part of the north wall behind the former dry cleaner.
3. Pull up all of the floor slabs and excavate the contaminated soil.
4. Bring in clean fill.
5. Reset the slabs at a lower elevation.

The filing says the owner plans to move tenants out of any potentially affected spaces as soon as possible. It doesn't say which spaces those are. The proposed schedule has DEC accepting the site into the program in fall 2026, a combined investigation and interim cleanup work plan in November 2026, and excavation from March to June 2027. The application notes that these dates may shift.

DEC announced the application in a September 23 public notice and set Friday, October 23, 2026, as the deadline for comments. The documents are on file at Queens Community Board 7, 30-50 Whitestone Expressway, Suite 205, and at the Queens Public Library's Whitestone branch, 151-10 14 Road. The library is right next door. The state filing names it as one of the center's western neighbors along Clintonville Street. The full application and the environmental reports are in the DEC document folder for site C241310.

Above Ground, the Same Format With a New Face

For the rest of the center, the filing describes renovation and modernization of the existing buildings. The application states that "no rezoning of the property is currently proposed or anticipated," and the site stays in retail use under its current C1-2 commercial overlay. The planned improvements across the center include:

• Updated tenant spaces
• New building facades
• Upgraded site lighting
• Parking lot improvements
• New landscaping
• Utility infrastructure work
• New signage

This isn't the first time the land has been reinvented. According to the application, the Long Island Rail Road's Whitestone Branch ran tracks across the site by at least 1903. The tracks were removed between 1941 and 1950, and the land was vacant by 1954. The owners date the center to 1955. The environmental history in the state filing says the current buildings went up between 1966 and 1988, and that the addition now used by New York Sports Clubs was finished by 1989.

The new owners also hold interests in the Throggs Neck Shopping Center in the Bronx and Atlantic Plaza in Ozone Park, and they are part of the ownership group behind Shops on Broadway, the $175 million redevelopment of the former Broadway Commons mall in Hicksville. In Whitestone, the plan keeps the existing buildings and Key Food in place while the owners try to lease the empty storefronts.

For homeowners within walking distance of Clintonville Street, a plaza with fewer empty windows is part of what buyers see on their first drive around the block. If you've watched the center change and want to know how your own home would show in today's market, Michelle Zhao Group can walk you through it, in English or Chinese. Request a Luxury Home Valuation to get started.