Walk past 58 East Parkway on any weekday and you will see the same thing you saw six months ago: taped-over windows, a gutted interior visible through the gaps, and a paper sign that has been promising something for so long it has started to feel like part of the building. The space has sat empty since DeCicco Family Markets closed there in November 2024 after 31 years in the Village. A different branch of the DeCicco & Sons family, the one that already runs stores in Ardsley, Eastchester, Sleepy Hollow, and seven other Westchester towns, took over the lease and announced a smaller concept store called Piccolino. That was nearly two years ago. As of the first week of September 2026, the same week DeCicco & Sons was preparing to open its first Connecticut store in Greenwich, Piccolino in Scarsdale was still described in trade coverage as "planned to open soon," with no date attached.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Village center at 57 Spencer Place, in the space that used to hold the Japanese restaurant Akai, a construction crew has been laying a colorful tile floor for a restaurant called Capretta. That project is moving too, just not toward the same kind of opening.
The easy story here is delay: another supply chain, another contractor, another Village project that missed its date. That story is true but it is not interesting, and it is not the one worth telling if you actually live in Scarsdale and have watched both storefronts through two winters. The more useful story is what the delay has exposed about what this two-block stretch of the Village is actually for.
Three Deadlines, One Pattern
Piccolino has now missed three separate target dates, and the goalpost moved twice within the same conversation before it moved a third time.
| Target Announced | When It Was Reported | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| December 2025 (original plan) | November 2025 | Passed, no opening |
| May 2026 (revised, same report) | November 2025 | Passed, no opening |
| Summer 2026 | March 2026 | Passed, no opening |
| No date given | September 2026 | Still "planned to open soon" |
Look closely at the first two rows. Both of those targets, the original December 2025 plan and the revised May 2026 date, came out of the same November 2025 conversation with the company. DeCicco's was not just late. It was already resetting its own deadline before the first one had even arrived. A single missed date is a construction problem. A deadline that gets revised before it is even due is a pattern worth asking about. The answer turns out to be less about contractors and more about the site itself.
The Parking Lot Was Never Big Enough
In November 2025, Joe DeCicco told a local reporter that a complete renovation was underway at the East Parkway site, gutted from the basement up, and that the company's simultaneous buildout of a new store in Glenville, Connecticut was likely competing for the same crews and attention. But he also said something more specific: the parking lot at the Scarsdale site is too small for the store DeCicco's would normally build, and the company was already working on arranging additional parking for customers. In the same breath, he described plans to let customers order online for pickup or use Instacart, specifically to speed up the in-store experience once it opens.
That detail matters more than the missed dates. A grocery chain does not build pickup and delivery workarounds into a store's opening plan because it expects a normal flow of walk-in errands. It does that when it already knows the physical site cannot support the kind of shopping trip people are used to at a full-size supermarket. Piccolino was never going to be a place where you park, fill a cart, and load groceries into a trunk in the East Parkway lot. The name itself gives this away: piccolino is Italian for little one, chosen specifically to describe the store's reduced footprint. The renderings presented to Scarsdale's Board of Architectural Review in July 2025 back this up, showing a curated format built around a tonic bar, prepared foods, and a wine and beer bar rather than full supermarket aisles, plus outdoor tables spilling onto the sidewalk at Spencer Place. One local real estate professional familiar with the site described the scale as closer to a specialty grocer than a full supermarket. The delay is not the story. The delay is the evidence that the format changed to fit a site that was always going to be too small for what people picture when they hear the word grocery store.
A Restaurant Group Betting the Opposite Direction
Capretta is not trying to solve the same problem. Z Hospitality Group, the company behind it, already operates Aurora in Rye and Terra and Mediterraneo in Greenwich, restaurants built for sit-down dinners, not quick stops. Their other locations:
- Aurora, Rye, NY
- Terra, Danbury and Greenwich, CT
- Mediterraneo, Greenwich, CT
- Blackbird and East End, additional group properties
None of those are errand destinations. They are places you plan an evening around. Capretta, going into the former Akai space at 57 Spencer Place, is being built the same way, with construction crews working on decorative tile flooring rather than shelving and refrigeration units. Where Piccolino's format bent around a parking constraint to become smaller and more curated, Capretta's format was never trying to serve a quick trip in the first place. Put the two projects side by side and you get a clearer read on what this stretch of the Village is becoming: not a place where you run in for a dozen eggs, but a place designed for you to sit down, and for the smaller stops in between to be curated rather than comprehensive.
What Sundays Already Proved
If that sounds like a risky bet for a Village that just spent two years without a full grocery store, it is worth remembering that Scarsdale has already been testing a version of this idea every Sunday since the Village and the Scarsdale Business Alliance launched Destination Scarsdale in 2024. The Scarsdale Farmers Market sets up on Spencer Place at Chase Road from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., May through November, and Destination Scarsdale pairs it with live music and family activities that turn the morning into more than a produce run. Parking is free on Sundays at the Christie Place Garage, and the draw is not really transactional. People are not there because they need something specific from a specific vendor. They are there because the Village center has made itself worth showing up to anyway. Two years of watching that work on Sunday mornings is a reasonable basis for betting that a curated specialty store and a destination Italian restaurant can do something similar the rest of the week.
The Pressure Valve in Hartsdale
One more piece explains why DeCicco's has been able to take its time reshaping the format instead of rushing a full-size store to market. On September 4, 2026, Sprouts Farmers Market opened in Hartsdale, in the space that used to hold BEST Market on North Central Park Avenue, a short drive from the Scarsdale Village center. For residents who have spent nearly two years driving to White Plains, Eastchester, or Central Avenue for groceries, Sprouts adds a full-format option that is closer than most of those alternatives. It does not replace the need for something in the Village itself, but it does remove the urgency. With a full grocery store now a short drive away instead of a longer one, there is less pressure on Piccolino to be everything to everyone, and more room for it to open as the specialty format the renderings describe, produce, prepared foods, and a wine bar, rather than a rushed compromise trying to cover every aisle a supermarket would.
What This Means If You Live Here Right Now
If you have been waiting for a single ribbon cutting to signal that things are back to normal in the Village center, that is probably the wrong thing to wait for. What is actually happening is a slower reshaping of what the corner of East Parkway and Spencer Place is for. A curated specialty market built around pickup and a smaller footprint. A full sit-down Italian restaurant from a group that already knows how to run destination dining a few towns over. A Sunday market and activation program that already proved people will show up without a transactional reason to. And a full-size alternative in Hartsdale that takes the pressure off any of this needing to move fast.
None of that shows up if you only track it as a missed opening date. It shows up if you notice that everyone building on this block right now, from the grocery chain to the restaurant group to the Village's own Sunday programming, is betting on the same thing: that Scarsdale residents will keep coming back to this stretch of the Village not for what they need, but for what makes them want to stay.
If you are watching this corner of the Village change and wondering what it might mean for your own plans here, whether that is a move within Scarsdale or a step toward selling a home near the center of it all, Jennifer Fischman has spent her career reading exactly these kinds of shifts in the neighborhoods she grew up in. Schedule a free consultation to talk through what a changing Village center means for your own address.
