THE NORTH SHORE FED ITSELF WHILE SIXTY SEVEN MILLION DOLLARS WENT TO THE FERRY

Staten Island's North Shore has a food economy. It runs on Bay Street, Victory Boulevard, Targee Street and Port Richmond Avenue, in kitchens owned by Sri Lankan, Liberian, Mexican and West African families. A mile from most of it, at the foot of the ferry ramp, sits the address that got the money.

In 2013, with the Bloomberg administration on its way out, the city and state agreed to back an outlet mall on public land beside the St. George ferry terminal. The pitch was simple. The waterfront was underused, the ferry delivered millions of riders a year, and a retail complex at the terminal would pull that traffic into the borough. The regional council's funding application described the project as transforming underutilized public land on the North Shore.

The money followed the pitch. Empire State Development steered roughly 67 million dollars in state subsidies to the developer, BFC Partners, across three rounds of grants. The city's Economic Development Corporation added about 13.8 million in loans and 11.5 million in grants, and city officials tallied a further 19 million in tax abatements. Against a project cost of roughly 354 million dollars, the public package accounted for close to a fifth of the build.

Empire Outlets opened in May 2019 after four separate delays. The 200 room hotel in the original approval never arrived. Neither did the beer garden or the food market slated for early 2020. By late 2020 the developer was struggling to repay an 8.5 million dollar city loan.

In February 2022 the mall entered foreclosure. Filings put the debt at roughly 174 million owed to Goldman Sachs' Urban Investment Group and 38 million owed to Sterling National Bank. By May 2023, with the process still running, most of the storefronts were empty. On September 21, 2023, the complex sold at auction for 10 million dollars. The buyer was Goldman Sachs, already a lender on the property. Nordstrom Rack, the anchor tenant, announced its exit the following September. There is space for about 70 stores in the complex. Fewer than half are occupied.

The arithmetic is public. Roughly 67 million in state subsidies, plus city loans, grants and abatements, produced an asset that changed hands for 10 million dollars.

Lakruwana sits at 668 Bay Street in Stapleton, a little over a mile south of the terminal. The restaurant opened in the Manhattan theater district in the mid 1990s, lost its space to a fire in 2004, and began operating in its current Stapleton building in 2010. The family shipped the interior from Sri Lanka in a forty foot container. In 2017 Julia Wijesinghe opened a Sri Lankan cultural museum in the basement.

The kitchen carries a Michelin Guide listing. The New York Times named it among the hundred best restaurants in New York City in 2023, in 2024 and again in 2025. The weekend buffet is served on a banana leaf. The Staten Island Chamber of Commerce gave Lakruwana Wijesinghe a Louis R. Miller Business Leadership Award in 2021, in the established business category, after the family worked the floor themselves to keep the doors open through the pandemic.

Two blocks of Victory Boulevard in Tompkinsville hold the densest Sri Lankan food strip in the country. New Asha has run a counter at 322 Victory since the turn of the century, plates built off a steam table at the cheapest price tier on the island. Lanka Grocery is at 344. New York Lanka sells groceries and cooks at 313. Masala Harbor is at 323. Across from the mall itself, at 58 Richmond Terrace, a West African halal counter called Abey serves fufu and egusi roughly 240 feet from the property line.

Up the hill in Fox Hills, Mona's Cuisine works out of 360 Targee Street, Tuesday through Saturday, half past twelve until six. The menu rotates weekly. Liberian stews run alongside oxtails, jerk chicken and mac and cheese. Entrees land roughly between 13 and 20 dollars for portions built to feed two people, and the food regularly sells out before closing.

Targee Street sits outside the Bay Street Corridor rezoning boundary, which the City Council approved in 2019 and which covers parts of St. George, Tompkinsville and Stapleton along Bay Street. Park Hill, the neighborhood these kitchens serve, took in Liberian families through the civil war years and now anchors New York's Liberian community.

In June 2025 the Economic Development Corporation began collecting resident feedback on the future of the Empire Outlets site and the adjacent parcel where the New York Wheel was never built. On November 19, 2025 the agency announced a mixed use plan that would bring as many as 2,500 residents to the area. Delivering it requires rezoning the mall.

That is the sequence. Public money built a retail complex to attract visitors, the complex could not fill its space, and six years after opening the city is preparing to convert it into something else.

None of that proves the subsidy harmed the kitchens up the hill. The record shows something narrower and still worth stating plainly. Public capital went to one address by the ferry. The businesses that built the North Shore's food economy are on four other streets, and they are the ones open on a Tuesday afternoon.

SOURCING