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Downtown convenience store owner converting to full-service grocery
YOUNGSTOWN
A convenience store is being converted into downtown’s only full-service grocery store and will be ready to open in a month, its owner said.
Al Adi, owner of the Downtown Circle Convenience and Deli, received approval Tuesday from the city’s Design Review Committee to move his business’s front door to the middle of his storefront and put a walk-up window on the east side of the business.
It’s part of Adi’s plan to transform his convenience store and deli into a grocery store that will include fresh produce, meats, more deli products and hot foods that it already sells “and a lot more grocery items. The existing space will be transformed into grocery aisles.”
Bill D’Avignon, DRC chairman and the city’s Community Development Agency director, said to Adi, “We appreciate what you’re doing for downtown. There should be a real market for this.”
Adi said, “None of the big stores are going to come downtown. Giant Eagle’s not going to come. Walmart is not going to come so somebody’s got to do something. It’s a good project. It will do well.”
Once the grocery story is in, Adi said he’ll probably drop “convenience” from his store’s name and replace it with “grocery.”
It’s the first phase for the 16 W. Federal St. business project, and will cost about $100,000, Adi said.
That location has about 4,500 square feet of space, he said.
Adi also purchased the Pig Iron Press building, 26 N. Phelps St., at a sheriff’s sale for $56,200 and plans to eventually relocate the Circle Hookah and Bar in the back of Downtown Circle to that location. Doing so will free up an additional 1,800 square feet for the grocery store, Adi said.
Circle Hookah serves Middle Eastern food and has hookah pipes available.
Jim Villani, the longtime founder and owner of Pig Iron Press, confirmed Tuesday to The Vindicator that he’s lost the business and his Boardman home through foreclosure resulting from a subprime loan he took out in 2005, and that Adi is the owner of the downtown building.
The building was sold in a March 2013 sheriff’s sale for $90,000, but Villani was able to keep the business after paying $1,328 in back taxes. He said that’s not going to happen this time.
Adi said he would seek historic tax credits from the federal and state government to make improvements to the Pig Iron Press building.
There hasn’t been a grocery store in the downtown area in decades. Plans in 2013 to transform the ground floor of the 16 Wick Building into a full-scale grocery store quickly fell apart, and that building on Wick Avenue is currently vacant.
There are only four full-service grocery stores in Youngstown: one on each side of the city – on McCartney Road on the East Side, Gypsy Lane on the North Side, South Meridian Road on the West Side, and South Avenue on the South Side.
About 75 percent of the city’s residents live in food deserts, meaning they live more than one mile from a full-service grocer, according to Youngstown State University data.