Wal-Mart's plans to open its first New York City store at the southern tip of Staten Island have fallen through, company officials confirmed yesterday. The Ohio real estate company that was hoping to develop the site, Cedarwood Development, said it was dropping the project because it would have cost too much to remove toxic chemicals from the site. But opponents who fought against Wal-Mart's plans to open on Staten Island asserted that the cost of an environmental cleanup was a pretext, asserting that the plan had been dropped because of widespread community opposition.
See "Proposal to Build a Wal-Mart in Southern S.I. Is Scrapped", Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times, August 24, 2006