Pete’s Fresh Market gets OK for Tinley Park warehouse
The Tinley Park Village Board approved plans Tuesday by Pete’s Fresh Market to reuse a shuttered Kmart store for a warehouse, the initial phase of a project that will bring a grocery store to the site within two years.
The Kmart, at the southwest corner of Harlem Avenue and 163rd Street, has been vacant since 2017, and in May the village gave Pete’s temporary permission to use the 138,000-square-foot building to store dry goods and items such as store fixtures to free up more space for grocery storage at other locations.
Apart from a 76,000-squarefoot store that would be directly north of the former Kmart, Pete’s is proposing a second building of about 43,000 square feet that would be to the north of its store, according to preliminary plans.
Another 38,000 square feet of retail space would be wrapped around the northeast corner of the existing Kmart, according to the proposal. No tenants have yet been identified.
Stephanie Dremonas, an executive with Pete’s, told board members at Tuesday’s Village Board meeting the company plans to be long-term stakeholders in the village, “looking for generations to stay here.”
There is a Jewel- Osco at Harlem and 167th Street just south of where Pete’s plans to open its store, and a new grocery is being lined up as part of a redevelopment of the Tinley Park Plaza shopping center directly northeast of the Pete’s site. An Aldi’s store is just to the north of the proposed Pete’s.
“We can put a warehouse anywhere,” Dremonas told trustees. “Wewant to be here as a retailer.”
She and her sister, Vanessa Dremonas, are executive officers of Pete’s and daughters of the company’s founder, James “Jimmy” Dremonas.
She said the company’s plan is to break ground by next spring on the store, which would take roughly a year to build and another three to four months to stock and staff. Pete’s has committed to having the store ready for customers by early September of 2022.
Pete’s has 16 stores in the Chicago area, including Bridgeview, Calumet City, Evergreen Park and Lemont. Stores are either underway or planned in Matteson, New Lenox, Oak Lawn and OrlandPark alongwith Tinley Park.
The Tinley Park building would be one of the few locations where Pete’s has built from scratch, Dremonas said.
In Matteson, where the independent chain hopes to open sometime this month, it has been converting a vacant Dominick’s Finer Foods. In Orland Park, the company plans to renovate an Art Van Furniture store at 151st Street and LaGrange Road in a shopping center the Dremonas family owns.
Orland Park agreed to share with Pete’s sales taxes generated by the store, which is scheduled to open in early 2022.
The Kmart has five loading docks on the south side of the building, and Pete’s long-range plan is to add five more, according to the proposal. The loading docks are at least 500 feet away from a residential area to the west of Kmart, according to the village.