DeWITT — Following eight months of renovation work at the DeWitt Town Center, the 184,000-square-foot shopping center at 3179 Erie Blvd. East is adding six new tenants.

That’s according to the Syracuse–based Icon Companies, a commercial real-estate firm, which organized an afternoon press event June 24 to mark the end of the renovation work.

The event included a ribbon cutting for the newly renovated DeWitt Town Center and the Time Warner Cable office, the Icon Companies said.

Besides Time Warner Cable, the other new tenants, which will open for business “soon,” include Sky Zone Indoor Trampoline Park; Matthews Salon Spa; Pella, a window and door retailer; and Jreck Subs, a sandwich restaurant chain.

Pella is moving its window and door showroom from its current location at 2743 Erie Blvd. East in Syracuse, according to Graziano Zazzara, Jr., president and principal broker at the Icon Companies.

Another new tenant, Harbor Freight Tools, has opened for business.

Existing tenants include Five Guys Burgers and Fries; Taco Bell; and Empire Buffett; along with Oreck, which sells vacuum cleaners and other cleaning supplies; and the DeWitt location of Irving, Texas–based OrthoSynetics, a dental and orthodontic practice-management firm. 

The tenants, including Time Warner Cable Business Class, collectively employ a total of about 600 people, according to the media invitation for the event. 

For example, the Time Warner project will create 95 new jobs over the next four years and moves 171 existing Time Warner Cable Business Class jobs into the new facility, the company said last November. 

That space had long been vacant.

It’s taken four-and-a-half years of waiting for the “right tenant mix,” Graziano Zazzara, Sr., a principal in DeWitt Town Center, Inc., the entity that owns the DeWitt Town Center, said in speaking with reporters at the press event. 

“Thanks to New York state. They really gave Time Warner a great incentive to build, and fortunately it was here in DeWitt and they chose our center, which really was the catalyst to make this thing happen,” Zazzara said.

New entrance
The DeWitt Town Center also includes a new entrance “Now you can see it coming off the road, where before, it was really … a screwed-up entranceway,” he said.

The parking lot also has new pavement and new lights, he added.

“If you get a national tenant [Time Warner Cable]… something strong, something clean, it draws better tenants … and we had to wait for that,” Zazzara, Sr. added.

The Zazzaras opened Paradise Market, a flea market, when they acquired the property in January 2010.

The flea market allowed them to “to turn the lights [on],” but it wasn’t their long-term goal for the facility. Paradise Market closed in 2011 following a year-and-a-half of operation, Zazzara, Sr. said.

“The problem with it … no national tenant would go into a plaza that had a flea market,” he says.       

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com