Community meeting to focus on Bridgeport Stop & Shop conversion
BRIDGEPORT — North End residents and anyone else interested in a proposed plan to turn the shuttered Madison Avenue Stop & Shop supermarket into a self-storage facility are encouraged to attend a community meeting Feb. 14.
City Councilwoman Michelle Lyons on Friday said she and her colleague, Councilwoman AmyMarie Vizzo-Paniccia, organized the 6 p.m. Tuesday event at the North Branch public library and the site’s new owner, Hugh Scott of SimCove LLC, is supposed to attend.
“We strongly suggested we have a meeting so this way he can present his plans and people in the North End and throughout the city can hopefully show up, listen, voice their concerns, their opinions if they want this there, (or) don’t want this,” Lyons said Friday.
Scott did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
His application for the former Stop & Shop, which closed in late 2012 and has remained vacant, will come before the Planning and Zoning Commission Feb. 27 after originally being scheduled for a public hearing last month.
SimCove purchased the property in August 2021 for $4 million. Scott said last month that the plan, if approved, is to rehabilitate the existing structure and “make it look brand new again” without expanding the existing “envelope.”
According to his application on file in City Hall, while more have been built in recent years, there is still plenty of demand for selfstorage facilities in Bridgeport and in the North End in particular.
Scott is also proposing to provide “at least 50 parking spaces that will be available to be rented to help satisfy local parking needs.”
“The clear positives are it will dramatically add to the tax base and put virtually no burden on city services, as well as have little traffic impact,” Scott had said of his self-storage vision.
Under the new city-wide zoning regulations that took effect last year, the former Stop & Shop property is designated a “mixed-use center” for storefront, commercial and civic purposes.
North End residents and their local elected representatives have been known to be extremely opinionated about significant commercial and residential developments proposed for that neighborhood and successful in defeating some of them. In 2019 a private builder who had a plan to build student dorms and rent those to nearby Sacred Heart University students failed to move forward, as did a proposal last year by Fairfield University and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport to establish a new two-year college in the North End.
Lyons on Friday said she has received mixed opinions from constituents about Scott’s intention for the empty supermarket.
“I have some people that said at least it will be quiet. Then other people said, ‘No, this is prime real estate,’ ” Lyons recalled. “I think this meeting will be very helpful to know what the majority of the people want in that spot.”
Vizzo-Paniccia last month said she would fight an approval. She complained that initially the Stop & Shop was forced on the area back in the 1990s.
“Another eyesore will be built in Bridgeport and in a residential area,” VizzoPaniccia had said in a statement. “That grocery store was ‘pushed’ through years ago, and still folks are pushing! I had asked many times to (the) economic development (department) to push for investors to make like a mini-mall to house retail, coffee and deli shops. But, again, all common-sense suggestions (were) ignored. This is not a case of NIMBY but what is right for the taxpayers in my district.”
NIMBY is short for Not In My Backyard.