An Islandia retail center that has some big spaces to fill is about to get some help.

Off-price store Burlington, Tractor Supply Co., Starbucks and Chase Bank will be opening locations in the Islandia Shopping Center by this summer, said Jon Cohen, vice president at Blumenfeld Development Group, the Syosset company that owns the shopping center.

The shopping center has a high vacancy rate after losing some large tenants, including a Stop & Shop, TJ Maxx and Blink Fitness.

The tenant changes and new construction “will be a repositioning of the shopping center,” which was built in the 1980s, Cohen said.

“We expect it to be a thriving shopping center. It’s very well located with a new tenant mix [coming],” he said.

An approximately 30,000-square-foot Burlington and 40,000-square-foot Tractor Supply will split space that Stop & Shop vacated in 2022, Cohen said.

Freestanding buildings with drive-thru lanes are being constructed for the 2,500-square-foot Starbucks and 3,750-square-foot Chase, he said.

Burlington confirmed that it will open stores in Islandia and Massapequa this spring but the off-price department store chain declined to provide more details. 

Of Burlington’s 15 stores on Long Island, six have opened since November 2023.

Asked about its plans for the Islandia Shopping Center, Seattle-based Starbucks Corp. said it had no new-store plans to announce. Chase declined to comment specifically about a new Islandia branch.

“We regularly evaluate our [Chase] branch network to ensure we are providing the services our clients need in locations that are convenient, and we look forward to continuing to serve our 1.4 million customers on Long Island,” said a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., in Manhattan.

Tractor Supply, which sells supplies and equipment for home improvements and farming, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Brentwood, Tennessee-based retailer has two Long Island stores — one that opened in Medford in 2018 and one that opened in Calverton in 2019.

Located on Veterans Memorial Highway, the Islandia Shopping Center is an approximately 390,000-square-foot property whose largest tenants are Walmart, Famous Footwear and a freestanding Dave & Buster’s.

The shopping center in recent years has lost some large tenants, including a Blink Fitness that closed in August after its parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Cohen said. A TJ Maxx that was in the shopping center relocated to Hauppauge in September 2023.

Quincy, Massachusetts-based Stop & Shop closed its Islandia supermarket in 2022 because it was underperforming, according to the retailer, which closed four more Long Island stores last year amid growing competition from discount and specialty grocers.

The Islandia Shopping Center is 81.4% leased, according to the CoStar Group, a Washington, D.C.-based provider of real estate information.

The shopping center has the asset of being in a good location, and the new tenants will be strong draws for other businesses, Cohen said.

“And we’re optimistic on the balance of the vacancies being leased up over the next 12 months,” he said.

Burlington grows in smaller spaces

For the past few years, Burlington has tried to improve sales and cut operating costs by opening smaller stores. In 2020, when the chain had 761 stores, Burlington announced a plan to grow to 2,000, and having a smaller-store prototype is part of the equation.

The Burlington, New Jersey-based chain now has about of 1,100 stores nationwide.

The average size of the company’s new stores was 45,000 square feet in 2017.

Last year, the retailer opened 116 new stores and relocated 31 oversize, existing stores — and almost all of them were the retailer’s 25,000-square-foot prototype, Burlington Stores Inc. CEO Michael O’Sullivan told analysts during an earnings call in November.

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.