Tenant Announced for Former Stew Leonard's Site in Orange

It’s officially all over, for those who had held out hope that one day a Stew Leonard’s grocery store would be built in Orange.

The town of Orange has approved Tangoe’s plans to construct a 4-story, 80,000-square-foot office building with 378 parking spaces on Marsh Hill Road land that was once owned by Stew Leonard’s, the New Haven Register reports.

Tangoe is a software company with more than 2,000 employees in 15 separate offices. The company hopes to be in its new home by January 2017.

Tangoe has signed a 15-year lease with the property owner, R.D. Scinto of Shelton, who is a prominent commercial real estate developer.

In 2010, Stew Leonard Jr. announced that he had abandoned plans to construct his dairy store in Orange after a group of neighbors, called Save Our Neighborhood, continued to appeal his plans in court.

Neighbors battled Leonard for more than a decade and during one point, Leonard vowed to fight to build the dairy store in Orange and he even remarked that he had even put that stipulation into his will.

But Leonard reversed course and continues to build new stores in other states including New York.

Read the full New Haven Register story here.

Patch file photo of a Stew Leonard’s store