Department store will open 160,000-square-foot behemoth at Bay  Plaza Shopping  Center. Store will be retailer’s second in the borough.

Attention shoppers: A big new Macy’s is coming to the Bronx. The Cincinnati, Ohio-based department store chain has signed on for 160,000 square feet at the Mall at Bay Plaza, a site under construction at the Bronx’s Bay Plaza Shopping Center.  The store, expected to open for business by spring of 2014, will take up three floors and be connected to an existing 150,000-square-foot JC Penney, which is currently open on the ground floor of the center.

The new Macy’s will “deepen our presence in the diverse and densely populated New York marketplace,” said Ron Klein, chief stores officer at Macy’s, in a statement. The 850-unit chain currently has one store in Manhattan, two in Brooklyn, three in Queens and one in the Bronx’s Parkchester section. Mr. Klein noted that the new outpost will sell merchandise tailored to the needs of the Bronx neighborhood. Construction is slated to begin this spring.

Developer Prestige Properties is currently in the process of leasing the remaining 470,000 square feet of the Mall at Bay Plaza, which will include a 1,800-car parking garage. Asking rents for the shopping center range from $100 a square foot to $200 a square foot.  Prestige Properties is spending about $270 million to develop the Mall. The new construction is expected to create over 1,700 permanent jobs for the area. As part of the existing Bay Plaza Shopping Center, the Mall will bring the center’s total size to 2 million square feet.

On Wednesday, Macy’s, which recently announced it will be spending $400 million to renovate its existing Herald Square flagship, released third quarter earnings. The store raked in a net income for the quarter of $139 million, versus $10 million in the year-earlier period. Sales totaled around $5.85 billion, a 4% rise from last year. Same-store sales, an important measure of a retailer’s health, were up 2.2% in October.

Source: Crain’s New York Business