Brooklyn Neighbors Hope Navy Yard Wegmans Can Bring More Than Just Cheese Counters

I first spotted Jackie Conyers across the street from the Farragut Houses, unloading bulk goods from her minivan. A young mother of four who has lived at the NYCHA development near DUMBO for 11 years, she regularly drives to BJ’s Wholesale in Middle Village for meat, ice cream, condiments, and other groceries. For produce, she said, the best local option is a fruit cart, “but I go to a fruit place in Flatbush. Their prices are better.”

Conyers, like most of her neighbors, is hyper-aware of where to get the best prices on groceries: She makes too much money at her hotel job to be eligible for food stamps, and finding the lowest prices for the best quality groceries for her and her kids, which is difficult without going to more than one store. “All my money goes to food and bills, that’s it,” she said.

Starting in October, Conyers will have another choice for her grocery shopping, when Wegmans throws open the doors of its first New York City store as part of the city-led redevelopment of the nearby Navy Yard. Wegmans is a family-owned chain whose reported cleanliness, freshness, and low prices inspire notable devotion—a recent survey found it to be the nation's favorite grocery store, "Wegmaniacs" take to reddit threads to extol the virtues of their prepared foods from pumpkin pies to giant subs, and a high school in suburban Boston even wrote a musical about them. It's also known for providing good benefits for its employees, something that has drawn the notice of local residents amid the otherwise largely upscale reenvisioning of the onetime blue-collar hub.

The Navy Yard Wegmans only arrived after many false starts. “It was a long, long road,” Community Board 2 District Manager Robert Perris told Gothamist recently.

In 2011, the Bloomberg administration announced that Admiral’s Row, a set of twelve vine-covered 19th-century houses that since the 1980s had stood empty along Flushing Avenue, would be torn down and replaced with a 74,000-square-foot supermarket. The city-run Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation declared that the project that would create 500 industrial and retail positions, something then–City Council speaker Christine Quinn applauded because the neighborhood was “sorely in need of jobs.”

Then the project ran aground. The first developer dropped out because of a bribery scandal; the second because insuring the site against hurricanes was too costly. Finally, in 2015, it was announced that Rochester-based Wegmans had won the bidding war to be the chosen store. The Navy Yard Wegmans promises an in-store cafe, “restaurant quality prepared food,” and a “European open-air market look and feel.” The grocery chain is known for an abundance of fresh produce, and in-house everything: butchers, florists, and cheesemongers, among other things. It also promises “consistent low prices,” and even cut prices on some staples early this year to aid those suffering from the government shutdown.

The Admiral's Row site at the southwest corner of the Navy Yard is surrounded by three massive NYCHA residences, the Walt Whitman, Ingersoll, and Farragut Houses, that together are home to more than 11,000 people. Like Conyers, many residents note that their grocery options are terrible and they and their neighbors need good jobs. So do they think that Wegmans will make a difference?

The Brooklyn Navy Yard opened in 1801 and was — for most of its history — a vital epicenter of employment for the adjacent communities, a site of good union jobs that helped create a prosperous North Brooklyn middle class. During World War II, the number of people employed at the yard peaked at 68,000. But in 1964, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced the yard would be shuttered, and in 1966 it closed, signalling the beginning of the end for Brooklyn's industrial economy.

Yet Stan Wright, a retired city employee and longtime neighborhood resident who I met sitting outside the Farragut Houses, said that throughout the 1960s and early 1970s the neighborhoods surrounding the Navy Yard still felt like they were on the upswing. “This place used to be booming!” he said. “Money was everywhere.” It was a time when “you could quit your job today, and get another job tomorrow.”

In those days, the streets surrounding the Farragut Houses, now spitting distance from Wegmans, used to have everything a person could need. Then, as industrial jobs disappeared, so did local retail. As Wright explained, gesturing towards the corner of York and Gold streets: “Now there’s no fish market, no hardware store, no liquor store, no cleaners, no shoe repair, no fruit stand, no cab service. There used to be a check cashing place, but that’s gone. There’s no barber shops, no beauty salons, no bars, no dollar store, no meat market. Nothing. There’s no pizzeria. What kind of neighborhood doesn’t have a pizzeria? It's been like that for decades.”

Aldona Vaicuinas, President of the Vinegar Hill Neighborhood Association, agreed: "There’s not a lot of jobs in the neighborhood anymore. Most of the manufacturing warehouses have shut down. We used to have the Brillo warehouse. We used to have all kinds of stuff here."

Wright said the last big influx of jobs people in the neighborhood felt was when Barclays Center opened, but that seemed to fizzle quickly.

Wegman’s promised to deliver approximately 500 jobs, 150 of those full-time. (According to Elena Volovelsky, principal economist with the state Department of Labor, there are about 17,000 grocery workers in New York spread over 2,200 stores, which means that an average grocery store employs only about eight people—“think a corner bodega,” she said.) In a country with some of the worst worker protections in the developed world, a humane private employer that offers some paid vacation, six paid holidays a year, access to healthcare, and matching contributions to a 401(k) is hopping over a low bar.

An important aspect of Wegmans for the community is that there is room for advancement, added Darold Burgess, president of the Ingersoll Tenant Association. “Not only is it walking distance, it also a career,” he said. His residents “normally don’t get jobs like this. It’s usually temp jobs or construction jobs. Nothing of this magnitude.”

Burgess and other community leaders said Wegmans reached out to its neighbors in an attempt to hire people from the area, including attending Ingersoll tenant meetings. Two Farragut residents say that job opportunity flyers were posted in their buildings' common areas, and mailings were distributed earlier this year to inform residents of job opportunities.

Since its creation in 1981, the quasi-public nonprofit Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation has been in charge of developing the site for the city, with a stated mission of “creating and preserving quality jobs, growing the city's modern industrial sector and its businesses, and connecting the local community with the economic opportunity and resources of the Yard.” Back then, heavy industry was still at the forefront of plans for the Yard: A trash incinerator was almost built, but that project, as well as a proposed medical waste disposal, died in 1995 amid community opposition.

In 1999, the developer Doug Steiner won a 70-year lease to build a movie studio at the Navy Yard. In the subsequent years, the BNYDC worked to attract over 400 companies in the fields of technology, light manufacturing, and upscale retail. Soon, a myriad of small manufacturing companies, like the AI-centric Nanotronics, populated the campus. Building 77, once a windowless warehouse, now houses a yet another slick Brooklyn food hall, this one offering the now-chic Russ and Daughters. Soon, WeWork moves into a new 16-story office building perched on a dock. And then there’s Wegmans.

According to a BNYDC spokesperson, the Yard carefully vetted potential grocery stores, submitting a price comparison of various grocery chains to community leaders (Burgess confirmed this), while also requiring Wegmans to "maximize" local hiring. BNYDC held 108 events for community members who hoped to apply to the grocery store, assisting with resumes and interview preparation.

In the end, according to BNYDC, the store received 1,560 job applications, 38 percent of them from NYCHA residents and 21 percent from applicants living at Whitman, Ingersoll, or Farragut. BNYDC President and CEO David Ehrenberg told Gothamist, “Our approach to hiring is informed by our broader mission to connect local residents with quality jobs at the Yard. In the case of Wegmans...we far exceeded our expectations for applications, and we’re hopeful we’ll do the same once the store’s final hiring is determined this fall.”

Since 1999, BNYDC has also run an Employment Center that, according to a spokesperson for the Yard, last fiscal year provided job placements for 459 people, 84 percent of whom lived in Brooklyn and 34 percent in NYCHA buildings, and 46 percent of whom had only a high school diploma or GED. The development corporation also operates a high school that trains students in science, tech, math, and arts—all skills necessary to work in the new Navy Yard jobs.

Wegmans declined to provide the names of any of its new hires for interviews, on the grounds that “our employees at the Brooklyn store are currently focused on hiring and training new employees so we don’t want to ask them to take time away from those tasks for a story that will not benefit them in the long run."

Conyers, who applied for a job at Wegmans, was ultimately turned down because the store didn’t have any positions available for the time between her morning hotel job and the time when her kids get out of school. For a part-time job, she recalled, the interview process was "crazy," with three different interviews, the last one "all the way out in Jersey.” She speculated that a lot of people at Farragut might also have balked at the opportunity to apply to Wegmans because of worries about a criminal record or lack of a high school diploma. (There’s no indication that Wegmans discriminates based on a criminal record or high school diploma, though they appear to do a thorough background check.)

The NYCHA residents I talked to were more excited about the prospect of shopping at Wegmans. The existing local grocery stores in the area, they all agreed, are expensive, small, and low-quality, with untrustworthy meat and fruit that is often close to spoiled. Isabella Lee, president of the Walt Whitman Tenants Association, assured me that the Bravo on Myrtle is likely “going to lose a lot of customers once Wegmans comes in.”

Many in the NYCHA buildings, it seems, travel outside the neighborhood to do their shopping. Residents mentioned that they go to Key Food, Target, Brooklyn Bazaar, Costco, Trader Joe's, BJ's, Western Beef or even the Walmart in Valley Stream, which is an hour away by car. Most shop at multiple different stores across town to find the best deals. Linda Rasheem, a longtime neighborhood resident who I met coming out of the Bravo on Myrtle, remarked, “We’re not all poor, but everyone is trying to squeeze a penny.”

A closer grocery store would also be a boon for the elderly and the mobility-impaired, said Burgess. Some stores pick up elderly NYCHA residents and take them shopping, but Burgess suggested that can be exhausting if the store is too far away.

Teresa Moore, a city employee and resident of Whitman Houses for over 30 years, said she thinks the arrival of Wegmans can only be a good thing. The Bravo on Myrtle, she said, “doesn’t meet the standards of the community. We want organic food, we want fresh foods.”

Still, she stressed, she and her neighbors need more than just another shopping option. “We need jobs, we need training," she said. "You know? That would give us hope.”

Corrections: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of David Ehrenberg's name, clarify that the BNYDC Employment Center job statistics are for fiscal year 2018, and indicate that statistics on Wegmans job applications were provided by BNYDC, not Wegmans. Gothamist regrets the errors.