A Streets Market grocery store will anchor new retail space in a downtrodden West Baltimore lot as developers try to revitalize a once-infamous section of North Avenue.

The store will replace an abandoned day care center on the 600 block of West North Avenue, adjacent to a new multimillion-dollar housing development built on a vacant complex once known as “murder mall.” The store will fill a gap in West Baltimore’s food desert and help catalyze investment in the North Avenue corridor, officials and developers said at an event Monday where they ceremoniously began demolishing the vacant building.

“Together, we’re turning a new page for this long-overlooked community,” said Baltimore developer David Bramble, co-founder of MCB Real Estate, which is leading the Reservoir Square project. The development team, which also includes Alex Aaron’s Blank Slate, said in a news release that the $170 million project would create 20,000 square feet of retail space, more than half of which will be used by Streets Market.

The store will be Streets Market’s fourth in the city. The D.C.-based grocer has locations in downtown Baltimore, near the Bayview neighborhood and in Charles Village, as well as eight stores in Washington.

The mixed-use site is slated to open in 2026, the development team said in a news release.

“We’re moving really fast,” said Campbell Burns, the grocery chain’s vice president of development, calling the new “community-driven” store a “tremendous opportunity.”

The future site of the retail space, once occupied by Dayspring Head Start, is now overgrown and tagged with graffiti. Bramble, who grew up in and still lives in the Madison Park neighborhood, told the crowd of dignitaries that the vacant building has become a “true nuisance” for the surrounding Reservoir Hill community in recent years following decades of disinvestment in West Baltimore.

One of those dignitaries had a personal connection to the day care center — U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume once worked there. While he was a freshman at Morgan State University, he was the day care’s head janitor.

“Dr. [Martin Luther] King had died about two or three years earlier. There was a whole effort to rebuild these communities,” said Mfume, 76. He said that in 1972, the building was a “state-of-the-art day care center” that gave him “the most headaches.”

“Kids were in here all day long. And you talk about a building that was jacked up after school,” he said.

The selection of products at Streets’ full-service grocery stores varies slightly based on the location — for example, the store on Eastern Avenue, located in a community with a growing Hispanic population, offers a wider selection of international products than its downtown location.

“What we try to do is we say, ‘OK, this is what we think they want,’” said Campbell. “Then we hear all you guys come in and say, ‘No, this is wrong. Do this, do that,’ and then we execute on it.”

The development team didn’t announce the employment headcount at the store.

Several low-income neighborhoods in both east and west Baltimore are in food deserts — meaning they don’t have reliable access to healthful, affordable food. Plans for the new grocer were announced only weeks after the opening of The Mill on North, a food hall farther west on North Avenue.

“I don’t know, y’all. Might be time to buy some real estate on West North Avenue,” Aaron said.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott called the project an “8-acre commitment” to nearby residents and the city as a whole as officials work to draw investment into West Baltimore.

“We all know what this site used to be. We all know what was across the street,” said Scott, hailing the day care’s demolition as the start of “a fresh new beginning and a new renaissance that is happening up and down North Avenue.” His administration is relocating the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development, the city’s job assistance agency, to the site.

Bramble called it “frustrating” that the area has been overlooked by investors, saying that there’s “so much vibrancy, so much coolness in these communities.” He said the project “hasn’t been easy” since its inception in 2015, with deals falling through and times “where we felt like we were the only ones advocating for change.”

“Every time I was about to give up, someone reached out to me,” Bramble, who is also the developer behind the redevelopment of Harborplace, said outside the building in West Baltimore. Those people, he recalled, would say, “‘Please keep pushing on this. We need this. Thank goodness you did that because here we are, and we deserve it.'”

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