Home Care In Claymont, DE

CLAYMONT — Within 18 months of initial discussions, Agile Cold Storage celebrated officially starting sitework on its $170 million cold-storage facility at the former Claymont steel mill off Naamans Road.

The 265,000-square-foot warehouse at First State Crossing lies near the Interstate 95 interchange and within 10 miles of the Port of Wilmington. Although the entire project is projected to be built out over the next five years, Agile representatives aimed to have the first phase of 165,000 square feet of space done by early 2024.

But what was also critical to bringing this project to fruition was the relatively quick turnaround from first discussions to putting a shovel in the ground, Agile Cold Storage President and CEO Don Schoenl said. The Delaware Prosperity Partnership started conversations with Agile in August 2022, and New Castle County government’s Jobs Now program accelerated the plan review process.

“It’s not an overstatement to say that if you didn’t have expedited ability to approve projects, we probably wouldn’t be here right now because our competition would be building somewhere else,” Schoenl said during a Friday groundbreaking ceremony. “Even though it has been a while that we’ve been talking about it, in our jurisdictions we still wouldn’t be here today about to break ground on part of the facility.”

Agile is a 3-year old, third-party logistics provider that stores and distributes for other companies. Although the company itself is young, its management team has 20 years or more experience in the cold storage sector. Schoenl himself held key roles in Nordic Cold Storage and AGRO Merchants Group.

Those connections helped form Agile’s customer base, which Schoenl said include the largest fruit and vegetable importers from South Africa and Morocco as well as protein exporters from South America, Australia and New Zealand. The Port of Wilmington was a major draw for the cold storage company, with more than 6 million tons handled and much of it is fruit from South America, Central America and North Africa.

The port ranks among the top gateways for fruit and juice concentrates, with a 850,000 square foot on-dock refrigerated warehouse complex. It is also a chief banana port in North America, with Dole Food Company and Chiquita Fresh North America bringing cargo weekly.

Schoenl also added that among Agile’s clients, which he declined to name, many were looking to bring products from Ohio and Pennsylvania to be exported to the world. Right now, existing customers that are utilizing the Philadelphia terminal are being shipped to South Jersey and then back west to end users.

“We couldn’t make this investment without the infrastructure from the Port of Wilmington and the tremendous road infrastructure being right here on I-95,” Schoenl told reporters. “But it’s also about the availability of qualified labor. You can build a great building in a great location, and if we don’t have great associates to work with our service, levels won’t be where our customers need it to be.”

The next warehouse in Agile’s second phase at First State Crossing may include next-generation technology and automation. The company has two warehouses in its home state of Georgia and a third on the way, which will use automated storage and retrieval systems. In the next six months, Agile plans on starting projects in Pennsylvania, Buffalo, Chicago, Dallas and New Orleans.

“This is not just the old warehouse I worked with in college. This has technology, and then you’re looking at a whole different skill set in education of technical work and automation. It’s not just driving a forklift or pallet truck,” Schoenl said.

In total, Agile Cold Storage plans on bringing 130 jobs to Claymont, supported by a $4.56 million taxpayer-backed grant. The first phase aims to hire 100 people, once the warehouse is open. While there will be support services in human resources and IT, most of the staff hired will be loading and unloading containers.

The average annual salary for Agile employees to be hired is estimated at $56,000, and Agile representatives said they plan to hire mainly from the Claymont community.

“This area had been neglected, and that is not the case anymore,” Claymont Renaissance Development Corp. Executive Director Brett Saddler said. “I’ve always looked at what’s happening here as a snowball going down the hill. It starts out slow, and then it picks up speed. I am incredibly excited about Agile and what it means in bringing technical, good-paying jobs. Thank you for choosing us.”

First State Crossing is becoming a hub of economic activity to revitalize Claymont, which has stumbled since the Evraz steel mill closed in 2013. Local officials and the Claymont Renaissance Development Corp. have been working on affordable housing projects to draw residences, but projects at the business park like a speculative warehouse and Aglient hope to recreate some of the jobs lost with the mill.

First State Crossing also sits across the street from another redevelopment project where New York-based developer KPR will raze the former Tri-State Mall and build a 525,000-square-foot distribution center.

New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer recalled that when he was a child, he came to the Tri-State Mall to watch “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.” Now, he pointed to the construction zones as signs of progress for northern Delaware.

“This is a meaningful site to people of our state and the whole region. We are in competition every day, not just in New Castle County and Delaware, but in the Philadelphia area and the country,” Meyer said. “If we can’t win the day with a cold storage site by our port, there’s another port that will get the benefits. So we must win.”

When elected county executive, Meyer created the Jobs Now program, which offers an expedited plan review to non-residential developers to bring new or add jobs to the county. Applicants may have a pre-exploratory meeting with the county’s planning, engineering, permits and inspections divisions, as well as public works, Delaware Department of Transportation and the state Fire Marshal’s Office.

The county and state review teams identify possible challenges and a timeline for hearings. Applicants then provide plan submissions in that timeline, which are reviewed by county staff within five days.

“In the past, when it came to permits, licenses and zoning variances it would take forever. So we wanted to create a program that eliminates that problem, because time is money,” Meyer told the Delaware Business Times. “I think it matters more than any sort of benefit that we’re giving out like tax benefits – to look an investor in the eye and say, ‘if you want to create jobs here, we’re going to help you do it.’”

SEPTA commuter train service to the new Claymont Transportation Center starts Dec. 4, increasing the community’s attractiveness to businesses and residents and reducing hassles for commuting into – and just visiting – Philadelphia

The new station is a centerpiece of redevelopment of 425 acres on Philadelphia Pike, just south of the Pennsylvania line, that for decades was a steel mill. First State Crossing is in various stages of creating commercial, office, retail and residential buildings. And maybe a park.

“One of Claymont’s greatest assets has always been our location in relation Philadelphia,” said Brett Saddler, executive director of the Claymont Renaissance Development Corp.

“We believe that in addition to that, this substantial regional rail project will strengthen the former Claymont Steel redevelopment prospects and also create welcoming access to the proposed Claymont Riverfront Park and Marina.”

When the Claymont Transportation Center was announced in 2019, it was called a $71 million project due to be completed in 2021. Now it’s a $90 million project, opening two years later.

“There had been some delays early on in the project due to a duct bank that was found that we had to design around/avoid, an 8-inch abandoned petroleum line that was found and a longer timeframe than anticipated to get necessary design approvals and the necessary railroad coordination for construction,” said Charles “C.R.” McLeod, director of community relations for the Delaware Department of Transportation.

The new station will lead to three lanes exiting onto Philadelphia Pike. Exiting from the old station, by contrast, could easily back up on Myrtle Avenue.

A surface parking lot has 323 regular spaces, nine accessible spaces, four short-term spaces and eight spaces for charging electric vehicles, he said. A garage has 464 spaces, including 10 accessible and four EV charging.

That adds up to 808 spaces. The old station had 497 parking spaces.

“The spots will be free, but DelDOT, which subsidizes commuter rail in the state, reserves the right for future parking charges,” Delaware Business Times reported in 2019.

SEPTA runs 16 trains from Claymont to Philadelphia on weekdays, with nine continuing to Newark. There are 16 trains weekdays from Philadelphia to Claymont, with eight continuing to Newark.

The SEPTA schedule includes nine trains from Claymont to Philadelphia on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, and eight from Philadelphia to Claymont. All continue to Wilmington, but none to Newark.

“No changes are planned for the current service during 2023,” SEPTA spokeswoman Kelly Greene said. “Minor changes are anticipated on Jan. 7, 2024 related to ongoing Amtrak bridge and track state-of-good-repair work south of Crum Lynne and Wilmington.”

The station has a dedicated bus loop, and DART lists the new center on its Route 13 schedule.

The new center includes two 630-foot platforms; a covered pedestrian bridge over the tracks; ADA-accessible stair towers with elevators; and restrooms, security, waiting area and ticketing, according to JMT, the project’s lead architect. There are provisions for bicycle and pedestrian access and widening Philadelphia Pike.

Planners realize that the new station is a drab walk north to Naamans Road or south to Claymont.

A 2017 map shared by Commercial Development Co., which is developing First State Crossing, shows plans for a trail network that could easily make for a nicer connection to Darley Green, a massive mixed-use development to the south, with residences, retail and the Claymont library.

The network could also link into the Northern Delaware Greenway and the East Coast Greenway, said Steve Collins, executive vice president of CDC.

A grand opening of the transportation center is scheduled 10:30 a.m. Nov. 27, with RSVPs requested at [email protected]. After all the speeches, the Claymont Renaissance Development Corp. will host a reception at the nearby Darley House.

The old Myrtle Avenue station, which is owned by Amtrak, will be decommissioned, said Bruce R. Demeter, chief of performance and innovation for the Delaware Transit Corp., a DelDOT division That means removing structures that won’t be needed in the future, securing the tunnel entrance on the platform and closing the gates to Myrtle.

“The entrance to the I-495 pedestrian bridge on Governor Printz Extension will temporarily close to allow for DTC to construct a multi-use pathway across the parking lot at the existing station,” he said. “This pathway will connect the pedestrian bridge to the multi-use pathway that has been constructed from the new station to Myrtle Avenue entrance of the old station.”

The new center is named for Harris B. McDowell III, who represented the area in the state Senate from 1976 to 2020.

CDC is ready to donate land to New Castle County for a park, which would include six miles of trails on 50 acres of preserved land.

A design for Electric Arc Park also envisions a marina and an amphitheater. “A+ work,” Collins said of the plan, by the Coastal Resilience Design Studio, a team of University of Delaware students.

CDC would be expected to improve the site more before the county would agree to accept the land and run a park, he said.

“We remain committed to create a beautiful park on the Claymont waterfront, in collaboration with the developer and the state government,” County Executive Matt Meyer told DelawareLive in 2022, and a county spokesman said in November there’s “nothing more to add.”

CDC bought the old steel plant property in 2015, and its plans have evolved multiple times.

For instance, the land now set aside for a park was once considered as a port.

After the pandemic encouraged companies to let more people work from home, and people increased buying items online, the mix of buildings has changed.

When the center was announced in 2019, plans included 3.75 million square feet of construction: 2.09 million for residential (620 townhomes and 576 apartments), 844,000 for offices, 370,000 for industrial, 275,000 for office-industrial, 125,000 for a hotel (120 rooms) and 47,000 for retail.

The residential space is down to 1.8 million square feet, for 1,200 units, and it will still be “the largest waterfront development in the Greater Philadelphia market,” Collins said.

The space for offices will be “significantly less,” he said. A CDC page projects 500,000 square feet of Class A space, plus a parking garage for 450 vehicles.

The industrial space is already on the way to be significantly more.

First Industrial Realty Trust bought 28 acres from CDC and built a 358,000-square-foot logistics facility with 68 dock-high door positions and 238 trailer stalls. First Industrial has not yet announced any tenants for the warehouse, perched so conveniently to the interstate system.

“The building’s functional design, location, unmatched access and unsurpassed trailer parking are ideal for businesses looking to serve customers in this high-consumption zone,” John Hanlon, executive director for First Industrial, said in a statement.

CDC also sold five acres to Gaudenzia, which provides substance use disorder treatment services out of the steel plant’s old offices.

The space for retail is now listed at 105,000 square feet on CDC’s website.

“There no immediate plans for a hotel,” Collins said.

CDC expect to sell most of the land, but might retain the land with apartments, he said.

Agile Cold Storage broke ground in October for a $170 million facility at First State Crossing. The first phase of the 265,000-square foot-warehouse will be operational by early 2024.

The company has received up to $4.5 million in state grants for the project.

Agile plans on bring 130 new jobs to Claymont to handle “a wide variety of inventory” in a “multi-temperature storage network.”

Agile President and CEO Don Schoenl told Delaware Business Times that its clients include “the largest fruit and vegetable importers from South Africa and Morocco as well as protein exporters from South America, Australia and New Zealand.”

Proximity to the Port of Wilmington is a big asset: The port “ranks among the top gateways for fruit and juice concentrates” and is “a chief banana port in North America,” the Times wrote.

Many Agile clients are looking to export products from Ohio and Pennsylvania, he added.

For months, Tri-State Liquors has been the sole tenant in Claymont's once-bustling Tri-State Mall property.

The mall itself is long gone, closed since 2015 and crumbled six years later by the probing claw of a big digger. The same goes for the former Levitz furniture store next door. The property's owners, developer KPR Centers, plan a 525,000-square-foot warehouse, one of at least three massive warehouses arriving to change the landscape of Claymont.

More:What to know about Delaware's warehouse and industrial projects slated for 2024

But Tri-State Liquors, here since 1984 as one of the largest wine and beer and liquor stores in the state, has remained in the Tri-State strip mall property adjoining the former mall.

The store — which advertises "20,000 cases of imported and domestic beers, soda, wine, wine coolers, liquor and more" — kept its doors open even as other tenants disappeared, and as digging crews began laying the groundwork for the new warehouse's foundation.

"We always knew we had a long-term lease in place," said Tri-State Liquors co-owner Andrew Byer, whose father Joe founded the store 39 or so years ago and who now runs the store with his brother, Michael. "It was just a matter of figuring out what to do."

More:New Tri-State Mall owners to redevelop property starting with demolition of Levitz building

And so KPR built Tri-State Liquors a spiffy new green-awninged 15,000-square-foot building next door. Slowly over recent weeks, the Byers have been filling the space with new beverage deliveries while keeping the old store running.

"It was a win-win situation," Byer said. "We got the new building, and they're gonna get their nice project."

On Jan. 11 at 4 p.m., the family-owned wine, beer and liquor superstore will say goodbye to its former home and cut the ribbon to its new one, pretty much next door at 383 Naamans Road.

"We'll have food, we'll have a bunch of tastings going on, and we invited a bunch of people down," Byers said. "It'll be nice."

As of the day before its grand opening, the store was already mostly filled with everything from cabernet sauvignon to aged Scotch, with shelf after shelf of what Byer calls "the coldest beer case in the county." (That's 36 degrees, for the record.) A new battery of big-screen TVs means that customers can watch the Eagles or Phillies game while out on beer runs.

The original location was intended to stay open through Jan. 10, Byer said. But a power outage at the strip mall after Tuesday's storm meant they had to close the store a day early. The brothers hadn't intended to even lose a single day's worth of revenues, keeping the shelves at the first store fully stocked even as they filled the shelves of the new one.

They have a week to vacate the old property, Byer said. And then it's due to come down.

But the new store's opening day will have special significance for the family. Jan. 11 is the birthday of the store's founder, Joe Byer, a fact Andrew didn't even realize until he said the date out loud and an employee brought it up.

And so the store's first day in its new location will also be an homage to the person who started it all in 1984.

"We just lost him, so it's a little sentimental to us," Byer said. "But this is our 40th year. And we had a chance to move and open up this really nice store, and be a big part of the Claymont revitalization."

Matthew Korfhage is a business and development reporter in the Delaware region covering all the things that touch land and money. This may include tacos, oysters or beer. Send tips and insults to [email protected].

Rite Aid’s declaration of bankruptcy in mid-October was quickly followed by the announcement that it was closing two stores in Delaware – in Chestnut Hill Plaza near Newark and at 3209 Kirkwood Highway, near Prices Corner.

The only Rite Aid in Claymont – at 2713 Philadelphia Pike – closed Nov. 16, but without any announcement to customers.

Rite Aid now lists 33 locations in Delaware.

The company did not respond to requests for information about the closure in Claymont or whether any other Delaware locations are scheduled to be closed.

On Take Back Claymont, a private Facebook group, posters said that the store’s last day was Nov. 16.

People also said that they were surprised that prescriptions filed at the Claymont Rite Aid were transferred to Walgreens. Others said that employees told them it was contracturally or legally mandated to be transferred to the nearest pharmacy. Walgreens has a location at 1508 Philadelphia Pike.

After the bankruptcy, Rite Aid said it was closed 154 stores nationwide. Hundreds of more Rite Aid locations are likely to close, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Walgreens is also closing locations, the Take Back Claymont discussion continued. A Brandywine Hundred location at 4201 Concord Pike (near the Silverside Road intersection) is permanently closed, and there’s a Walgreens at 2119 Concord Pike, in the Fairfax Shopping Center.

Pharmacy closures are a trend.

“More than 16 percent of the independently owned rural pharmacies in the United States shut down between March 2003 and March 2018,” The Washington Post reported, citing a policy brief by the RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis at the University of Iowa.

Drugstore chains “are closing thousands of stores, leaving gaps in communities for medicines and essentials. Researchers find pharmacy closures lead to health risks such as older adults failing to take medication,” CNN wrote in October.

Pharmacies and pharmacists were hit hard during the pandemic, and Delaware lost all of its 24-hour pharmacies.

Coastal Resilience Design Studio students created conceptual plan that helped Claymont receive $1.5 million grant

Throughout its history, Claymont, Delaware, has had a special connection to the waters of the Delaware River. Located near the mouth of Naamans Creek in the northeast corner of Delaware, Claymont has been occupied since at least 1200 A.D., according to the Claymont Historical Society. The creek is named after the chief of the Lenape, the Indigenous people who inhabited present-day Delaware, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and Hudson Valley, New York.

But when two major highway projects — I-95 and I-495 — began in the early 1960s, Claymont suddenly found itself separated from the water.

Reconnecting Claymont to the water, and infusing the census-designated place with more green spaces, has been a refrain from the community that Delaware House Representative Larry Lambert has heard frequently — both from growing up and living in the community and serving on the board of the Claymont Renaissance Development Corporation (CRDC).

So when a 300-plus-acre site near the river that was once home to a steel mill and is now owned by the Commercial Development Company opened up for a redevelopment plan, Lambert said that getting a riverfront park was one of the community’s main priorities.

“One thing that has always been consistent when we got community input on what they would like to see [in the area] is a riverfront park,” Lambert said. “Getting a riverfront park is us delivering to the community what the community asked for.”

Having grown up in Claymont, Lambert said he remembers hearing stories from older residents about how they used to go down to the water and fish. When he was a teenager himself, Lambert and his friends found creative ways to navigate from Claymont down to the river.

“You can clearly see when you go down there that at some point, the community likely did have access to this riverfront,” Lambert said. “So that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to return Claymont back to what it once was.”

In order to get funding for a riverfront park, however, Claymont needed a conceptual design that could show off the park’s potential, including social, economic and environmental benefits.

That’s where the University of Delaware and students from the Coastal Resilience Design Studio (CRDS) stepped in.

Using the former steel site as a starting point for the park, and using the community’s input gathered from the North Claymont Area Master Plan, which held a series of three community workshops conducted in 2017 by the Wilmington Metropolitan Area Planning Council (WILMAPCO), the students in the CRDS were able to put together a Riverfront Park Conceptual Plan for Claymont.

Through Lambert, that design eventually found its way to the Bezos Family Foundation and helped secure a $1.5 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund’s Greening American Cities initiative.

Brett Saddler, executive director of the CRDC, was emphatic in his praise of the design put together by the CRDS students and said that without the design, it might not have been possible to get the Bezos grant.

“We were looking for a way to put together a concept design for the park, but we didn’t have the resources to hire a design firm,” Saddler said. “Unless you have a visual representation to show how we’re going to make this happen, the idea is not going to get any traction. It’s just going to be this vague idea floating out there in the ether.”

Philip Barnes, assistant professor and policy scientist at UD’s Joseph R. Biden Jr., School of Public Policy and Administration’s Institute for Public Administration who also serves on the board of the CRDC, suggested to Saddler that the CRDS might be able to put together a plan. Saddler said when he received the students’ final project, he was impressed by how professional it looked.

“When I got a copy of the draft, I was floored,” Saddler said. “I thought it was as good as anything that we would have spent $50,000 on — minimum — for a concept plan from a professional design firm. We’re ready to hit the ground running to continue fundraising, and we have that leg up because we have a great plan done by the UD students as a concept.”

The plan aimed to create a space that provided recreational opportunities for the community, such as riverfront access, trails, sports fields, an event space and a marina. This plan would also help to enrich Claymont’s regional profile and offer resilient solutions to ensure the longevity and vibrancy of the development in the face of a changing environment.

Jules Bruck, an affiliated faculty member at UD and director of the University of Florida’s School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, said the CRDS was happy to partner with the CRDC and other partners involved with the project, including Delaware Greenways, the East Coast Greenway Alliance and Delaware Sea Grant (DESG). In partnering with the East Coast Greenway Alliance, the plan looked to create connectivity with the East Coast Greenway, which consists of 3,000 miles of trails from Maine to Florida across 15 states.

The CRDS, a partnership between the Delaware Sea Grant College Program, the University of Delaware Sustainable Coastal Communities Initiative and the University of Delaware Landscape Architecture Program, was led by Bruck, DESG coastal communities development specialist Ed Lewandowski, and Ben Muldrow of Arnett, Muldrow, LLC, at the time the project was completed.

Lewandowski said it was a special feeling to have the opportunity to put together a plan for the town that he grew up in.

“I’m a product of Claymont. My father worked at the old steel mill, and the property along the riverfront represented an opportunity for a multitude of outdoor discoveries during my childhood,” Lewandowski said.

Students involved in the project came from UD, Penn State University, Northwestern University and Wilmington University. The two UD students who worked on the project were Ryan McCune, a 2022 environmental engineering graduate, and Delaney Pilotte, a 2023 landscape architecture graduate.

As for the overall goal of the design, Bruck explained that they were using community input to try to best meet the needs of the Claymont residents.

“We were looking to provide recreational opportunities for the community and how people from the community could access river fronts through trails, maybe put in sports fields or event space, and even a marina,” Bruck said. “Then, we wanted to establish connectivity to all the surrounding communities and enhance Claymont’s regional profile.”

As Claymont is also getting a new SEPTA train station and DART Transit Hub, which is expected to be operational in the fall of 2023, the CRDS was also working its design around the new station.

In addition, Bruck said it was important for the CRDS to do a coastal site analysis to ensure that the park would be viable now and in the future.

“Overall, all of our projects are about designing resilient solutions to make sure that they will live on during a time of changing environments,” Bruck said. “We did a site analysis to try to understand what the coast had to offer, and in terms of sea-level rise, of how things were going to change over time. We also looked at transportation units and where the transportation system was going, and we tried to understand the residents’ concerns to get at their sense of place. Once we had that information, we determined the design goals.”

Gainey, who has worked on many CRDS projects, said he is always amazed at how a diverse group of students from backgrounds including landscape architecture, civil engineering and environmental engineering can come together and create a cohesive design plan.

A proposed marina would include a 7,700-square-foot building to house a restaurant or community recreation center, with a boardwalk to provide recreational fishing opportunities.

“When doing the project, we imagined the waterfront park as an opportunity to link the surrounding communities and provide opportunities where we found gaps — such as the conditions and proximity of the parks surrounding the Claymont area at the time,” Gainey said.

Having the chance to design a park in an area formerly used for industrial purposes was also appealing to Gainey, and he said that he enjoyed the opportunity to create a park that would benefit the Claymont community now and in the future.

“Along with creating the opportunity to promote community building, there is inherent value in the many features of our design that foster economic and human-based growth through visitors and presenting a suitable park that addresses the feedback received locally and incorporates sustainable growth,” Gainey said. “One thing I've enjoyed greatly about projects like this one is identifying creative ways to incorporate direct feedback from the local community in ways that feed off the CRDS team's many disciplines.”

With the initial plan completed, and the Bezos’ funds in-hand, the next step is to raise additional funds to take the riverfront park from a concept to reality.

“This will be a deliberate process that will take years, and we appreciate everyone’s patience,” Lambert said. “But as you can see, we’re taking meaningful steps. For me, it’s really about the ‘we.’ It’s about the ‘us.’ That is what Claymont is about. Claymont is about solidarity. It’s about looking out for your brother and sister. Claymont is a strong, vibrant town, and we’re always making sure that we listen to each other. Together, our impacted communities, we’re going to keep working hard until we make sure that we return access to those green spaces and to the river.”