On the morning of August 14, a five-foot wheel of Grana Padano sat under a tent at 130 Wheatley Plaza while Carl DelPrete, the co-founder and CEO of Uncle Giuseppe's Marketplace, cut a ribbon in front of a crowd that had been watching the space behind that sign for the better part of a year. The store replaced a Stop & Shop that had run in that same footprint since 2015. For East Hills, a village with no supermarket inside its own borders, that ribbon cutting mattered more than it would almost anywhere else.
The Village With No Supermarket
East Hills is a residential village. It has a village hall, a golf course, a school district, and a park that anchors most of the civic calendar. It does not have a grocery store, a deli counter, or a butcher within its own lines. What it has instead is a border with Greenvale, and specifically with Wheatley Plaza, the shopping center that sits at the corner of Northern Boulevard and Glen Cove Road just outside the village.
That proximity is not incidental. When Wheatley Plaza opened in 1980, the 58 families who had just moved into the Northern Woods Estates section of East Hills found themselves living directly behind its parking lot, close enough that they complained about the shopping center's nighttime lighting until Castagna Realty, the plaza's longtime owner, put in landscape screening to block it. Nearly half a century later, that same physical arrangement still holds. East Hills residents do their grocery shopping in another municipality because the plaza that has always served them happens to sit a few hundred feet over the line.
Which means the identity of whatever occupies that anchor space is not a matter of local trivia. It is the answer to where a few thousand households buy dinner.
What Closed, What Opened
The space had been a Stop & Shop for eleven years, since 2015, when it took over a former Pathmark location after A&P's bankruptcy. Stop & Shop's parent company closed 32 stores nationally as part of a portfolio review, and the Greenvale location was one of them.
Uncle Giuseppe's, a family-owned specialty grocer founded in 2001 with its first store in East Meadow, signed a direct lease with Castagna Realty and took over the roughly 52,000-square-foot space. The Greenvale store opened as the company's 13th location overall and its ninth on Long Island, part of a stated goal of reaching 20 stores by 2029. The opening created about 250 jobs at the store itself, inside a broader company plan to hire roughly 1,000 people across its footprint over twelve months.
The grand opening leaned into spectacle on purpose. Along with the wheel of Grana Padano, there was a cannoli cart and a food truck serving fresh zeppoles. DelPrete also presented a $100,000 check to Cohen Children's Medical Center, part of the Northwell Health Foundation, during the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Inside the New Anchor
What actually changed for the person doing the Sunday shopping is the format. Uncle Giuseppe's runs on a specialist model rather than a generalist one, with departments built around individual craft rather than a single unified grocery floor. The Greenvale store includes:
- A scratch bakery, with bread now made in-store rather than trucked in from outside vendors
- A butcher counter running the company's "Sterling Silver" beef program
- A live seafood section
- A prepared foods bar with more than 130 ready-to-go dishes
- A pizzeria and espresso bar positioned near the front of the store
- A fresh pasta program using specialty Italian flour milled for the chain
"Our team members are the heart and soul of every Uncle Giuseppe's," DelPrete said at the ribbon cutting. "We are a company that believes in made fresh, sold fresh every day in every store."
That is a different shopping trip than the one East Hills had for the past decade. A Stop & Shop is built for volume and speed. A store with a dedicated mozzarella station and a five-foot cheese wheel as its opening centerpiece is built for something closer to a destination stop, the kind of place where the errand takes longer because you are choosing between three kinds of fresh mozzarella instead of grabbing a shrink-wrapped block.
A Long-Running Grocery Anchor
What makes this changeover worth noticing rather than shrugging off is how rarely it happens. Wheatley Plaza has had exactly three grocery tenants in that anchor slot across 46 years: Pathmark from the plaza's 1980 opening until 2015, Stop & Shop from 2015 to 2026, and now Uncle Giuseppe's. The first anchor lasted about 35 years; the next lasted 11 years. East Hills residents who have lived in the village since the Stop & Shop opened have watched their grocery anchor change once.
That slow rhythm is part of what makes the plaza function as a stable fixture rather than a rotating cast of storefronts. It also means the current version of Uncle Giuseppe's is not a pop-up experiment. If the historical pattern holds, this is the anchor East Hills households will be shopping at for the next decade or more.
What Didn't Change
The rest of the plaza's tenant mix stayed put through the transition, which matters just as much as what arrived. Ben's Kosher Deli has operated at Wheatley Plaza since 1982, more than four decades of continuous service that predates most of the plaza's other current tenants. Starbucks anchors the other end of the walkway. TJ Maxx and London Jewelers, the latter known for Rolex and Patek Philippe alongside its custom jewelry work, round out the retail side.
There is also newer activity in the smaller storefronts. Code Blue, a gift and clothing boutique carrying pieces from designers like the Parisian label Rokh alongside work from local artists, opened at the plaza in March 2025 and has kept a steady flow of first-time shoppers who come in without a specific purchase in mind and leave with something they did not expect to buy.
None of that changed on August 14. What changed was the one storefront every household in the trade area actually needs on a weekly basis.
The Weekly Loop, Recalibrated
The practical effect for East Hills is a grocery run that now runs longer and looks different. The generalist supermarket that fit into a fifteen-minute stop has been replaced by a specialty market built around browsing, sampling, and choosing between departments rather than checking items off a list as fast as possible. For a village that has always done its food shopping just across its own border, that is not a small adjustment. It is the first real change to the daily errand loop in over a decade, and it is happening at the same plaza that has quietly served as East Hills' pantry since before most of its current residents moved in.
If you are already shopping that loop, the new format is worth a slower Saturday morning than you are used to giving it. And if you are thinking about what makes a neighborhood function day to day, not just what the listing photos show, this is the kind of detail that tells you more than a walk score ever will.
If you are weighing a move into East Hills, or already live here and are curious what your home might be worth in a market shaped by details like this one, the Farber Locke Team can walk you through it. Get Your Instant Home Valuation and start the conversation with people who track this village as closely as they track the comps.
