by Michelle Mullen

For more than three decades, motorists in Riverdale have turned to auto shop South Riverdale Service for everything from routine oil changes to emergency repairs.

Those garage doors will close after the property’s owner accepted an offer to sell the site to the neighboring BP gas station. As a result, the longtime auto repair shop will have to vacate, with mechanic and owner Bruce Yudman saying he plans to close the shop on July 20.

For Yudman, who has operated the business for more than 35 years, the closure marks the possible end of a shop rooted in the neighborhood for generations.

“My landlord approached me back in December, telling me that the owner of the BP station made him an offer on the property,” Yudman said.

The BP location’s owner could not be reached for comment, but store management confirmed the sale to The Press.

Greg Shea, managing partner of TK Management LLC, whose group owns the property where the auto shop rests, said the building was never listed for sale and they had no plans to sell it.

“It was not on the market,” he said. “Somebody approached us with an offer that was substantial in comparison to the rent roll. When you are presented with a price that you were not soliciting and is off the market, it’s certainly something to consider.”

Shea said the ownership group also honored a right of first refusal contained in Yudman’s lease, giving him the opportunity to purchase the property before the sale moved forward. Yudman told The Press he briefly considered purchasing the property himself but it was not financially feasible.

The shop is the latest in a string of longtime businesses to disappear from Riverdale and Kingsbridge, where many community members and business owners point to rising property values and redevelopment as forces that continue reshaping neighborhood commercial corridors.

Yudman’s ties to Riverdale stretch back even further than his business. He grew up near West 236th Street and Waldo Avenue and opened the repair shop with his two brothers after the trio first operated a garage just north of the Bronx in Yonkers. When they relocated to Riverdale in the early ‘90s, most of their customers came with them.

“I’d say probably about 75 percent of my customers were from Riverdale anyway, so they moved with us,” he said, adding many of those customers never left.

Dawn Eaton, a longtime Riverdale resident, said she has trusted Yudman with every vehicle she has owned since moving to the neighborhood decades ago.

“Bruce has been part of this community from before I moved in,” Eaton said. “I’ve been using him since I’ve been in Riverdale, and that’s been 30 years.”

She said Yudman earned customers’ loyalty by treating their cars as carefully as he would his own.

“He’s honest,” Eaton said. “He doesn’t do any work that doesn’t need to be done.”

The news of the shop’s closure came as a shock. Eaton had dropped off her 2010 Toyota Corolla for an inspection, oil change and air conditioning recharge before walking to breakfast nearby. It was there that a waitress mentioned the garage was closing.

She credited Yudman with helping keep her 155,000-mile Corolla on the road by recommending only the repairs it actually needed.

“I needed Freon, so he gave me a shot of Freon,” Eaton said. “He could have easily said, ‘Ah, you know, you’ve got a leak and you’ve got to do this.’ I mean, somebody else could have easily said that.”

Before moving into the building more than three decades ago, Yudman operated across the street on city-owned property where the John F. Kennedy Educational Campus now stands. He recalled years of uncertainty as the land was marked for future development before eventually becoming part of the school campus.

Over that same period, he watched Kingsbridge’s once-thriving automotive corridor steadily disappear.

“There was an Amoco, Shell, Sunoco, Texaco, Mobil, Exxon and Gulf station,” Yudman said, reciting the former service stations that once lined a short stretch of West 230th Street from memory. “That’s how many shops were on that block. They used to call it ‘Gasoline Alley.’”

Now, finding another location nearby has proven far more difficult than it was decades ago. Yudman recently believed he had secured a new shop on Bailey Avenue after months of conversations with a property owner. But after touring the building, he said the owner’s son informed him it had already been promised to another tenant.

Still, Yudman hopes to remain close to the patrons who have sustained his business for decades.

Customer Phyllis Torney Katz discovered Riverdale South Service in 2021 after a friend recommended the shop when she became frustrated by expensive repairs elsewhere.

“Once you start going there, you learn very quickly that they are the most honest and straightforward and fair people,” she said. “Everybody says the same thing. Once they start going there, they never want to go anywhere else.”

Katz said the garage’s early morning routine has become part of its identity, with customers lining up before its 6:30 a.m. opening and chatting while waiting for the doors to roll up.

The shop, she added, has become as much a neighborhood institution as a repair garage,

“I’m just gutted,” she said. “It’s the one place I go that I know I can trust everybody there, and that I’m not gonna get ripped off.”

For now, Yudman said, time to secure a new location is running short. After negotiating several extensions since December, Yudman said the deadline is firm.

“My final day is July 20,” he said. “I have to be out.”

Keywords

South Riverdale Service,

Riverdale,

Bronx,

auto repair,

mechanic,

Bruce Yudman,

Riverdale businesses,

small business closure,

BP gas station