Kmart to close Penn Station location in May

The Kmart at Penn Station will be closing for good on May 4 after a 24-year run.

Some 160 employees will lose their jobs at the four-level megastore located at One Penn Plaza, according to a government filing.

The store, which has an entrance inside Penn Station’s concourse as well as on 34th Street, opened in 1996 as Manhattan’s first Kmart at a time when the retailer was hot. The store was viewed as heralding in the company’s urban expansion when it opened here more than two decades ago.

But the discount chain, which acquired Sears for $11 billion in 2004, has struggled in recent years to compete with rivals like Target and Walmart.

It has been steadily closing its 2,323 stores in the US, with most industry experts predicting that it will disappear entirely from the retail landscape as Sears struggles to stay afloat after its 2018 bankruptcy filing.

Just three Kmart stores will remain in the Big Apple after the Penn Station store closes.

Hedge fund mogul Eddie Lampert, who has owned Sears for the past 15 years, now operates the department stores under Transformco after buying it out of bankruptcy reorganization last year.

In November, Transformco said it would close about 100 Sears and Kmart stores, which leaves about 182 stores remaining.

The big box retailers have closed more than 3,500 stores and slashed more than 250,000 jobs over the past 15 years.