A son’s plan to upscale Western Beef’s real-estate empire is being reined in by his father. Jasper_Craven reports
The newly reopened Western Beef in Queens. Photo: Peter Castellana, Jr. The crown jewel in the Castellana family real-estate empire is a 20,000-square-foot Queens warehouse wedged between a Home Depot and a row of mom-and-pop appliance stores. For five decades it was a busy grocery store that offered cheap staples as well as specialty ingredients for the neighborhood’s Asian and Latino residents: dumplings, seaweed, chayote.
The two seem to have sworn an omertà-style code of silence over how exactly their disagreements played out in the boardroom. But Peter Jr. is adamant that Western Beef stay in the grocery business for the low-income customers it has always catered to. “You can’t be everything to everyone,” he explained as we walked along a row of empty white shelves in the Queens warehouse. “Let someone else cater to the Whole Foods, to the upper income. I’ll stick to the low income.
Peter Jr. swears he never witnessed his father’s unsavory practices, but found that New York deemed him a tough guy nonetheless. “I understood it’s gonna take my lifetime to possibly clear up a name for the next generation,” he said. A 1986 ad for Western Beef. Unlike his father, Peter III never really wanted to join the family business. He was drawn first to tech, then real estate. He ran a computer-chip business while attending NYU, and later used the profits from that venture to provide loans and investment to hard-up real-estate developers after the 2008 financial crash. While Wall Street firms once sneered at Western Beef, Peter III snagged a college internship at Morgan Stanley.
After he emptied out the Queens flagship in 2018, Peter III pushed for one of the store’s two commercial lots to be rezoned for residential use, hoping to put up a 100,000-square-foot apartment building. “I had a business plan, all the numbers worked out,” he told me. “I had some of the best economical minds available to me.”
When Peter Jr. took back control of Western Beef, he halted the high-end residential projects that his son was planning. At the site of a recently reopened Western Beef outlet near the Marcy Projects in Bed-Stuy, developers had “offered us big, big money for the real estate,” Peter Jr. said. “They wanted to put huge condominiums over there, like they’re doing in the whole area.” But he rejected their offer, and similarly backed out of his son’s Bronx residential project.
But in a city of increasingly upscale-grocery and specialty-food stores, not everyone is in favor of that ethos. In December 2020, a Western Beef store on the Upper West Side that largely served residents of the Amsterdam Houses projects lost its lease.
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