Construction Underway at site of RISE Fire

According to Jane Slavin, Director of the Office of Building, Zoning, Planning, Administration and Enforcement for the Town of Orangetown, the property owners of Pearl River Shopping Center on Middletown Road were recently issued a permit to reconstruct the sections of the building that were destroyed in the November 2021 RISE (Rockland Indoor Shooting & Education) fire, without a basement. Construction is under way to build the shopping center back to what it once was, with two new nationally known tenants occupying the spaces on the top floor.

“We are well underway with construction, anticipated to finish our portion of the construction sometime middle March, beginning of April,” said David Rosen, Executive Vice President of Rosen Associates Management Corp, the property manager for the location. “At that point we will deliver possession to those two national tenants who will need a couple of months to do all their interior buildout and alterations. If all goes according to plan, everything will be open, operating and back to normal sometime in summer 2024.”

This progress for the shopping center is over two years in the making. At approximately 12 p.m. on Sunday November 28, 2021, customers shooting in the underground range noticed a fire spreading through the walls. The inferno destroyed the adjacent Dollar General and Dunkin’ Donuts while forcing the temporary closure of several other businesses. It took over 24 hours for firefighters to control the blaze.

Local crews were forced to fight the blaze externally, as the thousands of rounds of ammunition stored inside RISE and their risk of detonating presented too much of a potential hazard to send crews into the building. Six firefighters were injured while controlling the inferno, but all were treated for minor burns and smoke inhalation.