Residents of Brooklyn’s tallest building can now make the shortest of trips to get to the supermarket.
Khim’s Millenium Market, the Williamsburg grocery chain known for its organic produce, prepared foods, and sushi, opened on Friday in the Brooklyner on Lawrence Street — making residents of the 51-story tower feel like they’re at the top of the world.
“It’s great because it’s close and convenient,” said Janet Olguin, a mother of two young children and a resident of the 490-unit edifice, who says she has been ordering groceries delivered by FreshDirect because she doesn’t have the time to walk to Downtown’s other grocery stores. “This is a huge selling point. When we first moved here three years ago there was nothing. ”
The vendor moves into a gigantic ground-floor space that had been empty since the high-rise opened its doors in 2010.
Representatives from the building, which is run by national real estate magnate Sam Zell’s company Equity Residential, said that the space had to be a supermarket because of demand from its tenants.
“We turned away a lot of different types of users who wanted the space,” Ross Kaplan of Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, which represents the landlord, told the Observer last year.
“[T]he number one thing all tenants wanted was a market.”
Khim’s Millenium Market is the third grocery store to open in Downtown, which is in the midst of a residential boom.
In 2009, Brooklyn Fare kicked off the foodification of what was once a grocery desert.
Last year, Metropolitan Citymarket opened in the ground floor of the Toren building on Flatbush and Myrtle avenues.
Reach reporter Eli Rosenberg at erosenberg@cnglocal.com or by calling (718) 260-2531. And follow him at twitter.com/emrosenberg.
