South Bronx Groups Push Back on Prologis Warehouse Talk

A community group stood outside the shuttered New York Post printing plant at 900 E. 132nd St. in Mott Haven and Port Morris on Thursday and told Prologis, one of the country’s biggest industrial warehouse managers, to stay away. The nearly 400,000-square-foot building has sat empty since the Post moved its printing operation to Queens in 2021, and locals say the last thing the neighborhood needs is another logistics hub.

The pushback comes from a corner of the South Bronx that residents have long called “asthma alley,” a label tied to some of the highest childhood asthma rates in the country. The area sits steps from the waterfront, hemmed in by highways and expressways and packed with industrial depots. “It’s not okay that we’re the place to bring facilities that contribute to our poor air quality,” Mychal Johnson, co-founder of South Bronx Unite, said at the press conference, as trucks rumbling past interrupted his remarks, according to The City Reporter.

Prolgis, whose tenants include Amazon, FedEx and Home Depot, has shown interest in the site for years, per lobbying records, reports and locals who have spoken with the company. The company says nothing is settled. A Prologis spokesperson, Mattie Sorrentino, said there is no “customer or final project plan at this time” and that Prologis is “evaluating the site, as we do other potential projects in the region.” Prologis also denied in a Monday statement that it has acquired the building.

The community side tells it differently. Zoe Voss Lee, an urban planner consulting with South Bronx Unite, told The City Reporter that during an Oct. 9 conversation, Prologis “essentially confirmed their plan to move forward with building a warehouse site” and suggested it might fall under Blue Highways, a city program meant to cut truck traffic. Sorrentino called the group’s claims “inaccurate and outdated” and said the site has not been selected for Blue Highways, a joint city Economic Development Corporation and Department of Transportation effort to move freight from highways to waterways.

The timing stung, Lee said. South Bronx Unite had held an August meeting with residents and MIT researchers to sketch out other uses for the lot, possibly a clean energy hub, a public community center or solar space. Those plans were preliminary but widely shared in the neighborhood, so Prologis reaching out about a warehouse earlier this month came as a surprise.

Lobbying records add another layer. City and state filings show Prologis has lobbied local elected officials about 900 E. 132nd St. since 2021, including this summer, with at least $15,000 in related lobbying contracts in the past year alone. Last year it also spent over $100,000 lobbying city agencies and officials on last-mile special permits, a proposed zoning change that would add scrutiny to some new warehouses, and a bill to regulate air pollution from last-mile warehouses. “A company that wanted to be a good neighbor here would not be lobbying on the rules that regulate pollution and give this neighborhood a say,” Lee said. Sorrentino responded that Prologis engages with policymakers on issues affecting its ability to serve customers and invest in New York, and believes officials should understand the practical effects of proposed policies on business and the movement of goods.

The ownership picture is tangled. The state transportation department partly owns the site, while the Galesi Group, a private developer, has held a 99-year lease since 1991, originally meant to expand freight rail in the city, according to an archived State Comptroller report and property records. A Galesi-controlled company owns the rest outright. In the late 1990s, the Comptroller questioned whether the lease terms served the state’s interest; the state DOT countered that using the space was a “major goal.” The Oak Point Link freight rail was built nearby a year later, and the lot has since been leased to the Post and FedEx.

The fight over 132nd Street is part of a bigger pattern. Since the pandemic-era online shopping surge, companies like Amazon and FedEx have pushed last-mile warehouses across the city, from the South Bronx to Red Hook, where Prologis is reportedly eyeing property too. Advocates say diesel exhaust from the freight traffic is a public health threat.