Falls Supervisors Grant Final Approval for Redevelopment of Former Acme Site

By Chris English, staff writer | Posted: Thursday, November 19, 2015 6:00 am

A vacant Acme supermarket on West Trenton Avenue in Falls will soon give way to two restaurants and a drugstore.

The township supervisors granted final land-development approval at Tuesday night’s meeting for the project at West Trenton Avenue and Pine Grove Road.

Board Chairman Robert Harvie and fellow Supervisors Jeffry Dence, Jeffrey Rocco, Brian Galloway and Jeff Boraski all voted to grant the approval.

Tom Hecker, the local attorney representing developer Buckingham Retail Properties Inc. on the project, said the Acme will be demolished and three standalone buildings constructed at the site. They are a 2,000 square-foot restaurant with drive-thru, a 6,000 square-foot restaurant with drive-thru and a 14,578 square-foot drugstore.

Hecker said the restaurants are unknown because no lease agreements have been reached.

He said the developer had reached a lease agreement with Rite-Aid to be the drugstore at the site but the deal fell through. Hecker said the developer is hopeful of getting Rite-Aid back on board.

If that happens, Hecker said he isn’t sure if the drugstore being constructed would end up being a Rite-Aid or a Walgreens since Walgreens recently reached an agreement to purchase the Rite-Aid chain for $9.4 billion. However, the sale has not yet been approved by the Federal Trade Commission and will face scrutiny from members of that agency, according to published reports.

Hecker said the developer, as part of the project, is planning to do extensive traffic-light and road improvements at the intersection of West Trenton Avenue and Pine Grove Road and is getting permits for those improvements from PennDOT.

He said it is hoped that construction on the project can start in the spring and be completed in either 2016 or 2017.