The Block Beat A Forty Story Tower In 2016. The Grocery Closed Anyway Last Month

The awning said 79 Green Apple Corp. The sign said All in One Deli Mart. Nobody in Brooklyn Heights called it either one. For more than thirty years the store on the corner of Henry Street and Pineapple Walk was Peas N' Pickles, and in late July it closed for good.

The last weekend was a receiving line. Customers came through to load up carts they did not need and to say goodbye to owner Minki Lee, to his family, and to the staff who had been behind that counter for years. Debbie Prince, who has lived next door for forty two years, put it plainly to the Brooklyn Eagle: "I depend on this place so much." Her adult son told the paper he could not remember the corner without it.

The Lee family named the reasons: the rising cost of goods, higher property taxes, and rent that went up after COVID. Three decades in, the business no longer worked.

Pineapple Walk is a brick pedestrian strip that runs from Henry Street through to Cadman Plaza West, lined with low rise shops. The grocery anchored the Henry Street end. It started as a convenience store with produce and grew into a full market in 2012, when it took over the storefront next door and roughly doubled in size, adding a deli, a salad bar and a pharmacy aisle. That expansion is when the name officially changed. The neighborhood ignored the change for fourteen years.

What that footprint bought the block was ordinary and irreplaceable at the same time: milk at eleven at night, a produce shelf you did not have to plan around, a register staffed by people who knew which kid belonged to which apartment. Dalila Gomez worked that register for twelve years. One parent told the Eagle that when your apartment is small, the corner store becomes part of your home.

Lara Birnback, who runs the Brooklyn Heights Association, told the paper losing a long standing neighborhood business is always hard and that plenty of people will feel this one.

Here is the part that makes this closure different from every other closure post you scrolled past this month.

In December 2015, shareholders of Whitman Owner Corp, the co op at 75 Henry Street that owns the Pineapple Walk parcel, learned a developer wanted to buy it. The opening number was north of seventy five million dollars. The plan was to demolish the low rise shops, including the grocery, the diner, the toy store and the pet store, and put up a forty story condo tower with new retail underneath.

By January 2016 the bidder was public. Anbau Enterprises had raised its offer to one hundred thirty million dollars for the parcel. Individual shareholders stood to collect six figure payouts. Neighbors organized against it anyway. Shareholders voted not to move forward, and the tower died.

Ten years later the grocery is dark. Nobody knocked it down. Nobody had to.

The mechanism that emptied 79 Henry Street does not hold a press conference. It arrives once a year in an envelope.

On January 15 of this year the city's Department of Finance published the tentative property tax assessment roll for fiscal year 2027. Citywide market value hit $1.659 trillion, up 5.4 percent. Taxable billable assessed value, the figure the tax rate is actually applied to, rose 5.6 percent to $325.8 billion. Retail buildings citywide saw taxable billable assessed value climb 5.9 percent. Brooklyn posted the steepest retail increase of any borough at 7.6 percent. Brooklyn also led the city on Class 2 assessed value, the class that covers co op buildings, up 11.1 percent.

That is one year. Stack the same envelope across a decade and set it against the other number in this story: independent grocery in this city runs on a profit margin somewhere between one and three percent. That band is not our estimate. It is the figure bodega associations, the National Supermarket Association and Gristedes have all been repeating in public through 2026 while arguing about city run stores.

A business clearing two cents on the dollar does not absorb a tax escalation, a post pandemic rent reset and a wholesale cost run at the same time. It does not go bankrupt in a headline. It thins out. It cuts hours, drops slow categories, stops replacing what breaks, and one summer the family decides thirty years is enough.

The detail worth holding on to is what the Lees did with their last week. They were not liquidating. They were making calls, working to place their longtime employees at other markets in the neighborhood so that the people who had run that register for a decade plus would have somewhere to go on Monday.

That is the part no assessment roll captures. The store was a business. It was also a small labor market, a message board, a place a fourteen year old had been looked after since he was small.

Brooklyn Heights is not a food desert. There is a Gristedes. There is a Key Food. There are options if you are willing to walk, and the comment sections filled up fast with people trading directions to the next best thing.

But the fight in 2016 was never about square footage of grocery. It was about whether a block gets to keep its own scale. The neighborhood won that fight and turned down the money. What it could not vote on was the annual bill, the lease reset, or the cost of a case of eggs.

Pineapple Walk still stands. The tower never came. The corner is empty anyway, and the next tenant will be paying rent set in 2026, not 1995. That decides what can open there far more than any community board ever will.

See who else is still holding a lease on that walk

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