Whole Foods is coming to Bushwick. The Amazon-owned grocer just signed a lease at 1224 Flushing Avenue, the big corner storefront at Wyckoff Avenue by the Jefferson Street L, where a “for rent” sign has hung for nearly a decade. For a neighborhood the city itself flags as short on fresh-food retail, a national chain moving in is genuinely a thing. Whether a small Whole Foods is the thing Bushwick needs is a separate question.
The deal was first reported by Crain’s New York Business, which pegged the lease at 10,000 square feet, and picked up by the New York Business Journal. Beyond that, Whole Foods and its owner Amazon have said almost nothing: no opening date, no official word on exactly what kind of store this will be.
The corner has a long, strange vacancy behind it. By the building’s paper trail, it was Mery Steelworks into the late 2000s, then a wireless-accessories shop, then empty. A “for rent” sign went up in 2016 and stayed. In 2022, H&M put signage on the building as if it were about to open a store there. It never did. City permit records show the space was quietly converted from manufacturing to retail in 2024, and picked up new illuminated signs and an entrance canopy just last month. The owner, Atlas Properties, per the New York Business Journal and the sign out front, has been trying to fill this corner for years.
Here is what makes it news beyond real-estate Twitter. Bushwick is one of the neighborhoods the city has formally flagged as short on places to buy fresh food, which is why it qualified for the FRESH program now subsidizing three new supermarkets here, as Bushwick Daily has reported. A Whole Foods Daily Shop is not a FRESH supermarket. But a full-service grocer choosing this corner is a real shift for a neighborhood the city itself classifies as underserved on food.
The building runs about 19,500 square feet, and Whole Foods is taking only half of it. The 2024 conversion split the ground floor into multiple retail spaces, so the grocer would share the block with two more storefronts still up for grabs. At 10,000 square feet, the store lands inside Whole Foods’ “Daily Shop” range, the small, bodega-ish format Amazon has been opening across the city, which runs 7,000 to 14,000 square feet against the 25,000 to 50,000 of a full Whole Foods, per The Real Deal. Crain’s reported the Bushwick store will likely be a Daily Shop, but the format has not been confirmed.
It would not be Brooklyn’s first Whole Foods, or even the closest to Bushwick. The original sits in Gowanus, open since 2013, and a 51,000-square-foot store has been on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg since 2016. The nearest small-format Daily Shop is closer still: a roughly 10,700-square-foot store that opened this year on Grand Street, right on the Williamsburg-Bushwick line. The Bushwick lease pushes that footprint a few blocks deeper east.
There is no opening date yet. The site sits on the northern edge of Brooklyn Community Board 4, which covers Bushwick and is where residents can press questions about new development, and the permit and lease filings for 1224 Flushing Avenue are public on the city’s Department of Buildings site if you want to watch it come together. For now, the only thing on that corner is a freshly signed lease and a storefront that has been waiting since 2016.
Featured image: via the 1224 Flushing Avenue property listing
