By Helen Klein
They missed the boat. After months of uncertainty, the School Construction Authority (SCA) has abandoned its plan of putting a school at the site of the old Fortway Theater, 6722 Fort Hamilton Parkway. The agency came to that decision, two years after it began looking at the location, after learning that the developer of the site, Spiro Geroulanos, had spent a significant amount of money revamping it in anticipation of a supermarket coming in. That supermarket, which has signed a lease for the first floor of the theater, is the Asian-owned GW Supermarket, which also has a store in Queens and several others on the East Coast. The news was announced by City Councilmember Vincent Gentile, who had recently taken a tour of the site with SCA officials, representatives of Community Board 10 and Jessica Lappin, the chairperson of the City Council’s Land Use Committee. While SCA had proposed in the fall of 2005 to build a 453-seat early childhood center at the site, to help relieve overcrowding in District 20, they had never made a commitment to it. Indeed, noted Gentile, SCA had told the site developer to go ahead with his plans because they couldn’t say for certain whether they would take the space. “I’m pleased over the fact that a supermarket will be coming to a community that, for over a decade, has been searching for one to serve the needs of the residents, and also to serve as an anchor for the commercial strip on Fort Hamilton Parkway,” Gentile remarked. While the supermarket is of Asian ownership, it will offer a wide variety of familiar American foodstuffs, said Gentile. He noted that he and CB 10 District Manager Josephine Beckmann had visited the Queens store and had seen “a significant amount of American-made products that everyone would recognize—Tropicana, Wonder Bread, Hershey’s. Anything that’s been part of the American staple diet will be found at the supermarket, and there may be some ethnic food, too.” Gentile said that those who toured the Fortway had been “shocked to see the extensive work that had been done,” including carving out an underground parking area. “I think all of us came away with the thought that such extensive work had probably cost Spiro a good amount of money,” he noted. In addition, said Gentile, the group had learned that the lease for the supermarket was set to begin in about three months. “This impressed all of us,” he remarked. It also put in relief the question, “What would be fair to the developer now that he’s gone this far?” said Gentile. “I think SCA, to their credit, saw that it wouldn’t be fair to him to take the building away from him.” Of course, the news that SCA has abandoned its plans for the Fortway means that DOE representatives will have to go back to the drawing board to find new classroom space for District 20—which includes schools in Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, Borough Park and Sunset Park—and which is one of the most overcrowded districts in the city. The district is slated by the Department of Education (DOE) to get approximately 5,000 new classroom seats in the current capital plan; however, finding locations to build new schools in such a densely built-up part of the borough has been extremely difficult. The capital plan allotted more new capacity to District 20 than to any other district in the city. “We still really have to come up with new sites,” Gentile concluded. “We have to redouble our effort. SCA has hopefully learned a lesson from this experience, that if they want a site, they should secure it as early as possible.”
