Bucktown has a date with Mariano's

Photo of Bob Mariano by Brian O’Mahoney/Sun-Times Media

Mariano’s will open a new 80,000-square-foot store in the Bucktown neighborhood on June 3, a company spokesman said Friday.

The store at 2112 N. Ashland, which will open at 6 a.m. on June 3, sits on 4 acres bounded by Ashland, Webster and Elston avenues.

It will be Mariano’s 10th store in the city of Chicago after Tuesday’s opening of a Mariano’s in a former Dominick’s store at 3145 S. Ashland in Bridgeport.

The Bucktown store is a new build that will employ 550 workers.

“This is a great location,” said Mike Senner, principal at Colliers International, a real estate broker who worked the deal on behalf of the seller, Helco, a holding company.

“This is a rare piece of property that’s not in a planned manufacturing district and is in a middle ground between Bucktown and Lincoln Park,” Senner said Friday. “It draws people like me — 30- and 40-somethings with two cars and two kids who live in the area. It serves the demographic.”

The property is also prime because the closest grocery stores — two Jewel-Oscos and a Treasure Island — are about 1 mile away, Senner said.

The property previously was the site of Hayes Mechanical, which moved to 5959 S. Harlem in 2008, just as the recession started.

Senner said it took about three years, until 2011, to make the deal happen because “the capital markets and the economy were a disaster.”

The Mariano’s grocery stores are run by Milwaukee-based parent company Roundy’s, whose CEO Bob Mariano spent 27 years working his way to the top job at Dominick’s, which he ran from 1995 to 1998.

Mariano has said previously that his namesake stores will employ 10,000 by year’s end after the chain expands to 29 stores throughout the Chicago area, including 11 former Dominick’s stores.