Former site of Kmart, Sears in West Babylon headed for redevelopment

Long Island’s first Kmart closed 3½ years ago but its former home will be getting a major face-lift.

A West Babylon building that used to hold the discounter and its sister store, a Sears Appliance Outlet, will be undergoing a major redevelopment that will include reducing its size and adding new facades to attract a better mix of tenants, said Sean Elias, of Elias Properties Management Inc., the family-owned real estate investment company in Jericho that owns the West Babylon property.

"We don’t know what’s going to be there but having more value will bring in synergy to this project," said Elias, who said the project will cost about $20 million.

The Town of Babylon approved Elias Properties’ plans to redevelop the 185,118-square-foot building at 1000 Montauk Highway.

Babylon’s zoning board of appeals approved variances Jan. 13 that will allow for fewer parking spaces and a smaller landscape buffer on the site, and the planning board approved the final site plan Feb. 28, according to town spokesman Kevin Bonner.

Elias Properties plans to reduce the size of the West Babylon building by 19%, to 149,974 square feet, and divide the interior space to create more tenant units. Improvements also will include landscaping at the 12.3-acre site.

New tenants will be arriving in 2023, which is when the major construction work will begin, Elias said. That work is expected to take eight months, he said.

Plans show the redeveloped building will have five tenants, but no leases have been signed yet, he said. But the new tenants could include stores, offices and restaurants, he said.

The West Babylon building’s only tenant now is Dollar Tree, which has been there since 2016.

Kmart and Sears’ former parent company, Sears Holdings Corp., had a master lease that allowed it to sublease some space in the West Babylon building to Dollar Tree, Elias said. When Sears and Kmart left, Dollar Tree was allowed to stay, he said.

Elias Properties plans on moving Dollar Tree to a different spot in the building, Elias said.

Chesapeake, Virginia-based Dollar Tree Inc. did not respond to Newsday’s request for comment.

Site history

The Kmart in West Babylon closed in September 2018 after 28 years there. It is unclear when the Sears Appliance Outlet closed.

The chains’ Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based parent company, Transform Holdco LLC, doing business as Transformco, did not respond to Newsday’s requests for comment.

Built about 60 years ago, the West Babylon building originally was occupied by TSS-Seedman’s, Elias said. The demise of that chain of discount department stores in 1989 created an opening for Kmart.

In 1990, when Kmart Corp. was the nation’s largest discount chain, with 2,300 stores, the retailer took over the vacated West Babylon retail space, opening its first store on Long Island, according to Newsday archives.

Kmart’s 104,000-square-foot store in West Babylon was then among the chain’s new prototype locations and larger than the typical 70,000-square-foot store, according to Newsday archives.

Sears and Kmart merged in 2005, creating Sears Holdings Corp., which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2018.

Thousands of Kmart and Sears stores had been closing across the country for years, partly due to the loss of shoppers to discount and online competitors.

Transformco bought Sears Holdings’ assets for $5.2 billion in 2019 but the closings have continued.

Long Island has lost a dozen Sears and Kmart stores since April 2018.

There is only one Kmart left on Long Island, in Bridgehampton. The Island’s last Sears closed in October, at Sunrise Mall in Massapequa.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.com@ToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.