Amazon warehouse plan for Sunrise Mall under review by Town of Oyster Bay

An Amazon warehouse and distribution center proposed for part of Sunrise Mall would operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week at the Massapequa site, according to plans under review by the Town of Oyster Bay.

The Amazon facility is proposed for a 26.7-acre portion of the mall property that the Seattle-based e-commerce giant intends to buy, Newsday previously reported.

The 150,348-square-foot Amazon facility would have a warehouse and delivery station with an accessory vehicle fleet service building and an automated vehicle inspection building, according to a site plan application submitted in November to the town's Department of Planning and Development.

The plans call for parts of the mall to be demolished, town spokesman Brian Nevin said in an email Friday, but he could not immediately say how much of the property would be torn down.

The site plan application, which refers to the proposal as “Project Alba,” states that the warehouse's tenant would be Amazon.com Services LLC.

The applicant is the mall’s owner, Sunrise Mall Holdings LLC, a joint venture that bought the 77-acre mall at a steep discount in 2020 with plans to redevelop the property.

But no revamp has taken place and the owner stopped renewing tenants’ leases in 2022. The only tenant left is Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Oyster Bay’s Planning Division is reviewing the application for the Amazon facility and preparing feedback for Sunrise Mall Holdings, Nevin said.

The project will require a site plan hearing before the town’s planning advisory board, he said.

The facility's construction would take 13 months, according to an environmental form submitted to the town as part of the building application.

Aside from the maximum of 305 drivers — third-party business owners and entities — who would be at the warehouse during a shift, between 75 and 100 warehouse workers would be employed at the site, the site plan application says. 

Land not sold yet

In May, the Nassau County Planning Commission approved Sunrise Mall Holdings’ request to subdivide the mall property to allow some of the land to be sold. At that time, Sunrise Mall Holdings officials told the commission that Amazon was under contract to buy 26.7 acres.

The land had not been sold as of Friday, according to Nassau County Clerk records online.

Sunrise Mall Holdings declined to answer questions Friday about plans for the mall, including whether the property sale to Amazon was contingent upon the Oyster Bay Town first approving the warehouse project.

“The information contained in the public records filed with the town is accurate and confirmed. However, related questions broach what are currently proprietary aspects of our agreement,” Jeffrey S. Mooallem, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Urban Edge Properties, said in an emailed statement Friday.

Urban Edge Properties, a Manhattan-based real estate investment trust, is the managing member of Sunrise Mall Holdings.

Amazon declined to comment Friday.

But in May, the company said it was “exploring options” at Sunrise Mall, “with the intent of opening an operations facility in the future.”

“An operations facility includes any of our various locations where Amazon conducts its logistics and fulfillment activities. These sites include fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and inbound cross-docking facilities,” spokeswoman Smitha Rao said in an email in May.

An operations facility could also be a “last-mile” site, she said.

A last-mile site is used to deliver purchases the remaining distance to customers' homes or jobs.

On Long Island, Amazon has eight warehouses, six of which opened in the last six years, and one planned for Route 110 in Melville.

After selling 26.7 acres to Amazon, Sunrise Mall Holdings would be left with 40.4 acres of the mall that it owns completely, as well as 10.3 acres that it holds under a 99-year ground lease from Liberty Utilities Corp.

The mall is in Oyster Bay’s light industrial district, but the property exists under a special-use permit granted by the town board in the 1970s.

Built in 1973, the 1.2 million-square-foot mall used to be a bustling property, but like many malls across the country, it has lost stores over the last decade due to a growing number of online retailers. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the challenges faced by shopping malls.

Sunrise Mall Holdings bought the mall from Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, a Paris-based company, in 2020 for $29.7 million, a steep discount from the $143 million that the property sold for in 2005.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

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.