It was late April, a year ago. Neighbors attending the groundbreaking ceremony for a coming Streets Market on the Bolton Hill – Reservoir Hill border were treated to a comic performance of our mayor steering a demolition vehicle brought to the site solely for photo-op purposes. Later the equipment was hauled away and the site sat as before, an ugly remnant of an abandoned brick structure.
Since then, developers have finished demolition, hauled away the debris and readied the site for what is to become “The Shoppes of Reservoir Square,” a 20,000-square foot commercial strip anchored by a 12,000-square foot spanking new grocery store, scheduled to open late in 2027. Streets Market signed a lease with MCB Real Estate, said Campbell Burns, the company executive in charge of moving toward the store’s opening day. “The design is done. Equipment is purchased. A floor plan is mostly complete.” The rest, he suggested, was in the hands of the builders, the Deities and the city’s permit issuers and inspectors.
When that day finally comes, Streets Market expects to give the neighborhoods “a full grocery store experience with at least 90 percent of what their shopping requires today,” Burns said. “There will be a big focus on quality products – no house brands and high quality produce – conventional and organic and much of it local. We’ll provide quality at fair prices – 10 percent lower on some products, 10 percent higher on others. Our sales will be very competitive.”
“We’ll carry a variety of specialty items, fresh meats and seafood,” he said, as well as paying attention to the specific demographics of the store’s catchment area. That includes the surrounding residential neighborhoods but also commuters exiting west from the JFX freeway on North Avenue, students and staff from nearby colleges, and others who mostly now depend on a nearby Save-A-Lot in Bolton Hill, a Safeway in Charles Village and a Giant in Hampden.
Hundreds of small-detail decisions go into planning and stocking a new store, Burns said. On a recent visit to the Homewood and Charles Village Streets stores by this writer, it was clear that each offered an obviously different range of products, presumably reflecting customer preferences. “We’ll be responsive to the desires of different diets, age groups, ethnicities, religions, and the blend of demographics around us – young families in apartments, longtime and new residents in row houses, seniors who can walk to the store from their high-rises, commuters….”
“We’re a small, nimble company, able to customize our stores to meet our customers’ needs. We think we know what we’re doing, but for the first 3 to 6 months we’ll be annoying our customers by asking them questions about their experience. We do old-fashioned listening and try to respond by providing new products or, if that isn’t feasible, to explain why.”
Produce and meats are, Burns said, “our meat and potatoes.” The store will buy butchered meat from local suppliers but do some cutting on premises. It will offer limited baked-in-store bread items but mostly will “buy from experts.” The store will accept SNAP benefits but will not sell tobacco products or lottery tickets. State law keeps most Maryland groceries from selling alcohol, but the adjacent retail area may include a wine and liquor store and a coffee and sandwich shop.
Streets Market is a privately owned independent company founded in 2014, known for acquiring independent grocers, as with Eddie’s Market in the Homewood neighborhood. In 2015 they re-opened a store in Charles Center, downtown, that until it closed was Fresh & Greens. Streets Market opened a new 23,000-square-foot anchor store in Yard 56, another MCB shopping center and apartment development in East Baltimore. It and its attached Fleet Street Spirits closed in March and is becoming a Lidl supermarket, a German chain that has a presence in the suburbs.
Burns said the new Reservoir Square location is more consistent with Streets Markets other stores. “Our wheelhouse is 6,000 to 15,000 feet,” he said. Safeway and Giant typically build stores as large as 60,000 square feet and they have closed smaller stores that became unprofitable, according to industry publications. The Streets chain is operated by a group of partners with a Korean-American principal, according to Food Trade News.
The store will offer 65 off-street parking slots, but the city zoning board is considering whether to allow changes in the westbound lanes of North Avenue for on-street parking where now there is a bus lane. At a recent hearing, some residents protested that proposal. In a letter to the city council, former Zoning Board director Rebecca Witt weighed in against the request.
Under city code, Witt wrote, variances are to be granted only “in cases of a site-specific practical difficulty, not a generalized business preference,” according to the Baltimore Brew. “The claimed difficulty arises from discretionary decisions made by the developer and prospective tenant regarding store size, internal circulation, and parking layout as well as from reliance on suburban parking standards that the city has explicitly rejected through its recently updated parking maximums,” she noted.
Testifying before the Council’s Land Use and Transportation Committee this month, MCB attorney Drew Tildon said the developer’s request was based on “the industry standard for grocery stores in this type of area – 4.6 spaces per 1,000 feet of gross floor area.” Streets Market “has been very flexible,” Tildon said, but no other grocer could be attracted with such a ratio.
–Bill Hamilton
