Grocery Store, Retail Plaza Coming To Bridgeport's East End

BRIDGEPORT, CT — A new grocery store and retail plaza is coming to Bridgeport's East End neighborhood, according to a statement from the Leviticus Fund. The project on Stratford Avenue has been dubbed Honey Locust Square and will feature a two-building, 10-unit shopping center with a full-service grocery store as its anchor.

The center is located in a USDA-designated food desert neighborhood, according to the statement. Ashlar Construction LLC recently closed on a $2 million loan from the Leviticus Fund to support the project.

Leviticus is a nonprofit community development financial institution established in 1983 to foster sustainable and affordable communities in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Ashlar founded in 2014 by Anthony Stewart, a Black developer, who grew up in East Bridgeport and started in the building trades alongside his father, a mason.

Until recently Stewart’s contracting business focused on communities outside Bridgeport, but he returned to the neighborhood of his youth to take on projects like this one.

According to Stewart, who grew up four blocks from the site, the East End was once a thriving community with the Mohican grocery store, a greengrocer called Tony’s, a pharmacy, and a beauty parlor where his mother, a beautician, worked.

"We used to play in the parking lot behind the shop, and she would walk us over to the Newfield library, which was really an anchor to the community," he said in a statement. "So much of that went away in the 70s and 80s – and now I’m rebuilding the whole block."

Honey Locust Square is Ashlar’s fourth major project in Bridgeport, including the development of an addition to the Newfield Library, a mixed-use development, and the redevelopment of a former department store into the Upper East Main Street Library.

The Newfield Library and Honey Locust Retail Plaza projects are part of an initiative to revitalize Bridgeport's East End.