Former Greece Wegmans could be converted to self storage

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The owner of the former Wegmans Food Markets property on Dewey Avenue in Greece is asking the town to approve a zoning variance to allow creation of a self storage facility.

Morgan Britton LLC, in documents filed with the town of Greece Zoning Board of Appeals, says efforts to lease the property have been unsuccessful since Big Lots and Goodwill of the Finger Lakes vacated in the past two years.

The location and sheer size of the property make it difficult to find tenants, the owner contends, telling the board that a Stor-It climate-controlled, secure self storage facility is best available option.

Self storage is not an approved use within the Dewey Avenue Mixed Use zoning district, which is why Morgan Britton is seeking a variance. The Zoning Board of Appeals is scheduled to discuss the matter at Tuesday’s 7 p.m. meeting at Greece Town Hall.

The former Wegmans property at 3640-3660 Dewey Ave. — part of an 8.5-acre plot between Britton and England roads — contains 74,500 square feet of space. CSL Plasma is the only tenant, with just over four years remaining on its lease of 13,868 square feet.

Big Lots shuttered its 32,800-square-foot store early in 2025 as part of a corporate bankruptcy filing while Goodwill exited from a 19,080-square-foot parcel in 2024. Morgan Britton said it has never been able to lease the other 9,700 square feet of available space.

“The only neighborhood-appropriate use to materialize … is the current proposal for Stor-It climate-controlled self storage,” attorney Betsy Brugg of Woods Oviatt Gilman wrote in a letter to the zoning board.

Brugg represents the applicants, Frank Imburgia of Morgan Britton and David Pelusio of Stor-It. Morgan Britton’s filing with the town says there was a net loss of $142,000 on the property last year.

The self-storage facility would contain as many as 400 to 500 units and would be designed to fill the entire building, should CSL Plasma ever leave.

Wegmans closed the Britton Road store in July of 2011, consolidating operations into its Mt. Read store less than two miles away.

Morgan Britton bought the property from Wegmans in March of 2012 for $2,250,000 and agreed to a restrictive covenant that prohibits any grocery or pharmacy from operating in the building, as well as any business that generates more than 25 percent of revenue from the sales of food meant to be consumed elsewhere.

Those limitations, as well as the location and the vast amount of square footage, make it difficult to find tenants, according to Michael Palumbo, a veteran real estate broker with Flaum Management who has been marketing the property.

“The center faces limitations tied to lower retail traffic … and soft demand for large-format retail space in this portion of the corridor,” Palumbo wrote in a letter to Zoning Board of Appeals. “At the same time, retail interest and growth patterns in the town of Greece have increasingly shifted toward the western and southern portions of the town, where tenants perceive stronger traffic counts, newer development patterns and retail clustering.”