Just six months after the Dominick’s grocery chain abandoned its 58,000-square-foot retail store in the North Riverside Park Plaza, a Chicago-based grocery chain has begun interior demolition on the property and could be open for business before the end of the year.
Tony’s Finer Foods, which has six stores in Chicago and the suburbs, is not just the new tenant in the old Dominick’s space at 7401 25th St. in North Riverside. The grocery chain’s owners have also purchased the entire strip mall, which extends from Harlem Avenue to the old Illinois Central Railroad spur line, on the south side of 25th Street.
Ingraffia-Gambino Investments LLC bought the strip mall from Tri-Land Properties on Sept. 12 for an undisclosed amount. Hugh Robinson, executive vice president of acquisitions for Tri-Land, confirmed the purchase last week. Tri-Land had owned the strip mall since 2003, when it paid $12.7 million to buy the property from the Simon Property Group.
Robinson said that Tony’s Finer Foods had expressed interest in the North Riverside location soon after Dominick’s closed. Negotiations started in April, Robinson said.
According to a sign on the property, the new store will be a “Super” Tony’s. The company’s store at 2099 Mannheim Road in Melrose Park is also a Super Tony’s, and boasts a bakery, large deli with homemade sausages, large produce and meat sections and a wide array of ethnic foods, including a sizeable Italian foods section.
While Robinson wasn’t completely certain, he believed that the North Riverside store would be the largest of the Tony’s supermarkets. Dominic Gambino, co-owner of Tony’s Finer Foods, did not return phone calls seeking comment about the new store. It is unclear when the store will open for business, but Robinson speculated that the company would likely do everything in its power to open up in time for the holidays.
“I suspect they’d want to get open before Thanksgiving,”Robinson said. “I suspect they’d move heaven and earth to make that happen.”
According to a 2004 Chicago Sun-Times column by Mary Laney, Gambino started the grocery business with his nephew, Tony Ingraffia. Their first store was a former A&P in the 3700 block of Fullerton Avenue in Chicago. The stores are part of the Certified Grocers cooperative.
The Melrose Park Super Tony’s, which opened in 2003, is adorned inside with murals of Gambino’s native Sicily.
Dominick’s opened their North Riverside store in 1977 and did well enough to expand the store in the 1990s. In 1998, the Dominick’s chain, long a Chicago institution, was purchased by Safeway Inc. After nearly a decade of customer defections and labor unrest, Safeway downsized its Dominick’s chain in Chicago, closing 14 underperforming stores in early 2007.