Square Feet: From Meat Shop to Mixed-Use Complex
January 12, 2011
For years, Luis Perez dreamed of expanding his busy Casablanca Meat Market in East Harlem, where for generations customers from as far away as Pennsylvania have shopped for blood pudding and fried pork skins. The butcher shop had long ago outgrown its cramped space on 110th Street between Lexington Avenue and the elevated train tracks on Park Avenue.
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Casablanca Meat Market, Luis Perez’s first business, is now housed in a complex he developed in East Harlem.
Mr. Perez outside his market with Nina DeMartini-Day of DDM Development and Services of Harlem.
When Mr. Perez was introduced to the principals of DDM Development and Services of Harlem in 2003, his plan evolved into something far more ambitious. Though he still greets customers in a red butcher’s coat, Mr. Perez is now the owner of a new $15.2 million mixed-use complex adjacent to the former meat market. It includes a spacious, up-to-date butcher shop and has a greengrocer that will stock items customers request, a sit-down restaurant and pizzeria and a 46-unit apartment building for people with incomes ranging from $23,040 for a single person to $99,849 for a family of four.
Last Friday, a pharmacy with a separate room for private consultations opened in the building that once housed the meat market. A Mexican bakery operates in another building that belongs to Mr. Perez.
With its stone tile floors and granite finishes ? details that Mr. Perez insisted on ? the development, named the Casablanca after the meat market, has transformed the appearance of a run-down block in what used to be considered one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. Mr. Perez’s efforts also inspired another property owner to spruce up two small apartment buildings next to the new development.
Mr. Perez, who emigrated from Argentina in 1976, said he felt good about contributing to a community that supported his business even when the neighborhood was riddled with crack and crime. “Everyone likes to live in a nice area,” he said. “Everyone likes to have something nice.”
Though projects like the Casablanca go largely unheralded, they can make a difference in how people perceive their surroundings, said Nina DeMartini-Day, a principal of DDM, which has developed more than 40 projects in Harlem since 1988, mainly for nonprofit organizations.
“In this period of large projects, it is the smaller, integral ones that change a block and change a neighborhood,” she said. “Sometimes, I don’t think the mayor understands the powerful impact that small amounts of funds can have in a neighborhood.”
Marc Jahr, the president of the city’s Housing Development Corporation, which provided $6.5 million in bond financing for the Casablanca, said the city encourages the development of commercial space in smaller subsidized apartment buildings. About 230,000 square feet of retail space has been created since 2003 in city-subsidized buildings with 80 or fewer units, he said. “In every instance, this commercial space has added to the strength of the community,” he said.
Despite the relatively small scale of the project, which measures 48,000 square feet, it took six years from the first meeting of DDM’s principals and Mr. Perez to get it completed. Residents, who were chosen through a 2008 lottery that attracted 5,000 applicants, began moving into the apartment building last summer. The restaurant La Corsa Pizzeria and Ristorante, with 55 seats, opened last month, and La Raza, a greengrocer with two stores in the Bronx, opened in October.
The centerpiece of what is called the Casablanca block, however, is the meat market itself ? a tidy, well-lighted store, where morcilla and longaniza sausages made by Mr. Perez hang in a refrigerated display case. About a dozen butchers, including two of Mr. Perez’s stepsons, work behind the counter, while customers sit on benches and wait as long as half an hour to be served.
In the basement, Mr. Perez stores items like cow’s feet and hen turkey wings. He has a room for making sausages, something he had to do behind the counter in the old store. He bought that store in 1985, after working there on weekends. Now he lives in Queens and drives to the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx before dawn in a Smart Car.
When Mr. Perez approached DDM with a proposal to enlarge the old store, Ms. DeMartini-Day and her partner, Terrence Moan, both former officials of the Koch administration, convinced him that he could build on a bigger scale by acquiring all of the adjacent property that he had been using for parking.
Fortunately, he could pay $1.9 million for the land and the predevelopment costs, Ms. DeMartini-Day said.
Mr. Perez began buying property in East Harlem in the 1980s, when prices were dirt cheap, out of a concern that the meat market might be vulnerable to condemnation, because it was next to vacant land. He wanted to have some place to go if the city decided to acquire his property for public housing.
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