ON THE MOVE
A minority-run car dealership is prepping to leave Canarsie — and owner Sammy Bical says he can’t wait to make the move to Mill Basin.
“I wish it could be done now,” Bical, the Guyana-born owner of Kristal Auto Mall, told this paper when discussing his plans to make a home for his business in the city’s Four Sparrows Retail Center proposed for the southern tip of Flatbush Avenue. “It’s going to be a beautiful facility.”
Kristal Auto Mall, which has selling Cadillacs, Buicks, Chevrolets and GMCs for the past 35 years from its headquarters at the corner of Kings Highway and Foster Avenue, is the only new business to be pre-approved for the shopping center, which will rise up between the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge and Kings Plaza — a site large enough to house a mammoth new Walmart as a tenant.
Bical, who’s owned Kristal Auto Mall since the early 1990s, said he’s been discussing the project with the city for more than a decade, adding that he will invest $30-million to build the state-of-the-art dealership and service and parts center. He’ll also be purchasing the land from the city, but would not say how much he intends to pay.
“I’ve always been renting [the Canarsie] property … I’m a month-to-month tenant,” Bical said of Kristal’s current home. “We’re going to own the new building.
With ownership will come privileges like designing his own building from scratch.
“Everyone will be able to move through our departments at a faster pace because we’re building it from the ground up,” he said. “Right now, people have to walk down half a city block to go to departments that should be right next to each other.”
Forest City Ratner Companies, who is currently building the controversial Barclay’s Center — the future Downtown home of the Brooklyn Nets — as well as a proposed 16-tower mini-metropolis containing more than 6,600 units of housing, will oversee the development of the rest of the project, which is expected to break ground in 2014
Plans call for either two additional buildings on the land that would house multiple tenants or one building the size of three football fields — perfect for a Walmart.
A spokeswoman for Forest City Ratner Companies would not comment on what kind of stores would be coming to Four Sparrows. An official at Walmart told us, however, that Four Sparrows has never been on its radar.
When completed, the property will be expanded to include up to three more buildings, more than 400 parking spaces and 15 acres of parkland.
A Toys ‘R’ Us already on the property, which abuts the 65-acre Four Sparrows Marsh Preserve, will remain, city officials said.
Bical said he wouldn’t mind operating his car dealership within spitting distance of a Walmart mega-store — as long as that’s what Brooklynites desire.
“I will go with whatever the community wants,” he said.
