St. George's Waterfront Is Running on Two Different Clocks This Fall

Stand on the plaza outside the St. George Ferry Terminal and look east. A glass residential building rises right at the water's edge, its harbor-view terrace and rooftop lounge finished and occupied. Turn west instead, and you're looking at fenced-off lots, the concrete stumps of a Ferris wheel that never got built, and an outlet mall with more empty storefronts than open ones. Both sites sit within a five-minute walk of the ferry. Both have been called the centerpiece of Staten Island's North Shore revival. Only one of them is actually finished, and the reason has nothing to do with money, ambition, or how much anyone in the neighborhood wants it done.

What Actually Got Built

The glass building is Lighthouse Point, a residential and commercial project at 5 Bay Street built on the former U.S. Lighthouse Service depot. Governor Kathy Hochul appeared in person to mark the completion of its first phase, which delivered 115 residential units, 60,000 square feet of commercial space, and 274 parking spots, backed by $16.5 million in state funding through Empire State Development. The developer, Triangle Equities, kept the site's historic wall along Bay Street and built the new structure around it.

Within months of that opening, Triangle Equities put the completed building on the market. JLL is now marketing it as a stabilized investment asset with an asking price of $45 million, the kind of build-then-sell move that's routine for developers once a project is leased up and generating income. Nothing about that sale means the project underperformed. It's simply what the end of a development timeline looks like when every approval needed to build was already locked in years before the first shovel went into the ground.

That's the part worth sitting with. Lighthouse Point didn't need permission from anyone this year. The site's zoning, its site plan, its public financing, all of it was settled well before construction started. Once the money and the crews were in place, the project ran on a straight line from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting to a for-sale listing.

What Just Started

Empire Outlets, right next door, is a different kind of project entirely, because it hasn't been approved for anything new yet. The mall opened in 2019 with room for roughly 70 stores. As of May 2026, retail tracking site malls.com counted 31 active brands there, less than half the space it was built to hold. Nordstrom Rack, one of its original anchors, closed its Staten Island location in September 2024. The mall sits next to the concrete footings of the New York Wheel, a 630-foot observation wheel that stopped construction in 2018 after roughly $450 million had already gone into it.

In November 2025, the New York City Economic Development Corporation unveiled a new vision for both sites, developed after five months of workshops, small group discussions, and a public survey that drew responses from more than 1,000 North Shore residents. The plan, designed by FXCollaborative, calls for as many as 2,500 new homes, more than 20 acres of public open space, and neighborhood retail in place of the current outlet format. NYCEDC's renderings even show the old wheel's concrete footings staying put, folded into a new landscaped esplanade instead of being demolished.

None of that can happen yet. Before any of it gets built, the sites have to be rezoned, and rezoning in New York runs through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, a public process with its own calendar. The environmental review for this plan is set to begin in the first half of 2026, with the formal ULURP process expected to start in the second half of the year and approval targeted for 2027. That means the earliest realistic construction start is still years out, no matter how finished the renderings look right now.

So when you compare the two sites, you're not comparing a fast developer to a slow one. You're comparing a project that already had its zoning fight behind it to one that's only now entering its own. Lighthouse Point's clock started when the paperwork was already done. The Empire Outlets clock only started ticking in November 2025, and it runs on a public timetable anyone can actually follow rather than guess at.

What's Actually Open This Fall

None of that construction timeline changes what's happening on the ground right now, and the St. George waterfront's calendar this fall is a lot fuller than the vacant storefronts suggest.

The St. George Theatre, which has anchored Hyatt Street since 1929, has a packed October ahead:

The theater is also mid-campaign on a Diamond Matching Grant Program with the Staten Island Foundation, where new donations get matched two to one through a limited window, on top of a fundraiser called Laughs on the Links on October 6.

Down at SIUH Community Park, the Staten Island FerryHawks are wrapping up a rough year on the field. Heading into a road series at Hagerstown in early September, the team's record stood at 10 and 45. But the season hasn't been a wash off the field. The team's own recap of "I Love Staten Island Day" describes thousands turning out for it, and the front office has already released the 2027 home schedule, with Opening Day set for April 20. Carlos Mirabal took over as manager for the 2026 season, and whatever happens with the current roster, the organization is clearly planning past it.

The Hyatt Street Greenmarket is still running its seasonal Saturday schedule through the fall, and the neighborhood's civic calendar has its own fixed points that don't depend on any construction timeline. Glen Mancuso, who recently marked 20 years running his Allstate Insurance office on Bay Street, sits on the board of the National Lighthouse Museum and has emceed the annual Borough Hall holiday tree lighting, along with helping coordinate a neighborhood restaurant crawl. Those traditions run on their own clock too, one measured in decades rather than ULURP filings.

Two Timelines, One Neighborhood

The practical upshot for anyone walking this stretch of Bay Street regularly is that the vacant storefronts you're seeing aren't a sign that nothing is happening. They're a sign that the next phase hasn't been cleared to start yet, and that clearance runs on a calendar with actual dates attached to it. The environmental review for the Empire Outlets and NY Wheel site rezoning is the thing to watch over the next year, not because it will change anything by this Halloween, but because it's the next real checkpoint before any of those 2,500 homes move from a rendering to a permit.

Lighthouse Point already showed what the finished version of a North Shore project looks like. The rest of the waterfront is still working through the part that has to happen before construction can even begin.

If you're trying to make sense of what a stalled site or a pending rezoning actually means for a property near the St. George waterfront, Albert Benzaken can walk you through it in plain terms.