PhillyDeals: As Bottom Dollar leaves, Whole Foods gets go-ahead

During the recession, discount grocery chains swarmed the Philadelphia area, hoping that smaller stores selling cheaper brands would lure hard-pressed Pennsylvanians from unionized chains like

ShopRite

and

Acme

.

The Bottom Dollar chain admitted defeat Wednesday and said it would shut its 66 Pennsylvania stores - none more than five years old - leaving 2,200 workers facing unemployment.

Rival Aldi, which is buying the stores for $15 million, won't say which sites would stay open. But the buyer is inviting Bottom Dollar workers to apply for jobs at Aldi's 85 Pennsylvania stores and its warehouses, spokeswoman Julie Ketay told me.

Aldi is owned by a branch of Germany's Albrecht food dynasty. Another Albrecht-founded firm owns Trader Joe's, which is also modestly priced but focuses on a cult clientele for specialized products.

Separately, a 4-3 state Supreme Court decision, written by Justice Seamus P. McCaffery a month before he left the court, has cleared the legal landscape for a long-delayed new grocery at the higher end of the food chain, in Newtown Square.

Equus Capital Partners, Daniel M. DiLella's Philadelphia-based real estate investment firm, says it has agreed to build a 41,700-square-foot Whole Foods Market at the 210-acre Ellis Preserve, where its neighbors will include SAP Americas, the Catholic Health East and Main Line Health hospital chains, the animal insurer Petplan, and other office employers. Sunoco plans to join them in the spring.

Equus hopes to add a 127-room hotel, 100 townhouses, 310 luxury apartments, 270,000 square feet of "headquarters" offices, and more than 300,000 square feet of additional retail in time.

Backed by Newtown Township officials, Equus had battled Claude de Botton, developer of the rival Shoppes at Marville, for permission to build there. McCaffery's decision cleared the last objections.

Among the center's selling points is its connection to two separate Peco substations, which Equus hopes will keep it immune from the power outages that plague Philadelphia's western suburbs. Equus says the lights stayed on at Ellis during Hurricane Sandy and last winter's ice storms. That is more than a lot of the people who worked there could say about their homes.

The former Frankford Chocolate Factory at 2101 Washington Ave., whose brick heart dates to 1865, is for sale, as lawyers for the heirs of its late owner, Truong Vinh Tran, liquidate his holdings.

Truong, a Vietnamese immigrant, paid $5.75 million for the nearly 250,000-square-foot complex in 2007, but never got around to building the $100 million housing and business center he projected. Center City has since spread into the adjoining rowhouse neighborhoods, and Frankford is "the largest piece of available development land in the city at the moment," CBRE's Robert Fahey says. "It's the hottest residential neighborhood in the city for people of decent means who want to walk to work."

The buyer faces a choice with the factory, says CBRE in its sale materials: "Convert the existing building into a residential use with commercial space while emphasizing the historic aspect, or demolish the building and start from the ground up."