Ironside Newark (right) overlooking Mulberry Commons Park in Newark — Courtesy: Edison Properties
By Joshua Burd
Edison Properties has landed the first two retail tenants at its Ironside Newark project, luring a café operator and an international halal food chain to the adaptive reuse project.
The developer announced Friday that Oren’s Daily Roast and Halal Guys has signed leases for the modernized historic warehouse building, which sits adjacent to Newark Penn Station at Edison Place and McCarter Highway. Both will open in Ironside Newark’s ground-floor retail space along Edison Place, occupying 2,012 and 1,294 square feet, respectively.
Jason Pierson and Ryan Starkman of Pierson Commercial represented Edison in both transactions. Both operators are expected to open during the first quarter of 2020.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Oren’s Daily Roast and Halal Guys as Ironside Newark’s first retail tenants,” said Lenny Lazzarino, Edison Properties’ executive vice president of leasing. “The arrival of a storied New York City coffee shop and an internationally recognized Halal food restaurant represent the next phase in Newark’s evolution into not just a city with a thriving office market, but also a dining and cultural scene that rival any in the region.
“Both of these tenants will add to the city’s already rich list of culinary destinations downtown, in the Ironbound and beyond. We look forward to each of them opening their doors in the near future and further solidifying Ironside Newark’s place at the center of the city’s ongoing renaissance.”
Oren’s Daily Roast, which was founded in New York City in 1986, has since grown to include seven locations across Manhattan in Midtown, Greenwich Village, West Harlem and the Upper East Side, according to a news release. Its location at Ironside Newark will be its first outside of New York City.
Halal Guys started as an acclaimed New York City food cart before expanding internationally in 2016, the news release said. Its Ironside Newark location will be its second outpost in the city, joining a location on Halsey Street that opened in 2017.
Both tenants will add to the offerings at Ironside, which abuts the newly opened, three-acre Mulberry Commons Park between Newark Penn Station and the Prudential Center. Edison Properties also expects to announce additional retail tenants in the coming months.
“We were elated to have secured two dynamic food and beverage operators as the first retail tenants,” said Starkman, a director at Pierson Commercial. “They will play a big role in providing strong co-tenancy as we continue to work through curating the remaining retail program for the development”
Ironside Newark’s upper floors feature more than 450,000 square feet of loft-style office space, which has been leased to tenants such as Mars Wrigley Confectionary and Ware Malcomb, along with law firms Pearlman & Miranda and Robinson Miller. Edison began redeveloping the former Newark Warehouse into Ironside Newark in spring 2017, marking the city’s first speculative office project in more than 30 years.
