Police returned on Wednesday to the site of a former grocery store to look for evidence in the 1979 disappearance of a 6-year-old boy.

New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne confirmed that investigators searched the retail space in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood, where the alleged abductor of Etan Patz once worked.

Police returned to examine an area that wasn't looked at on earlier visits, Browne said. The effort, he added, "wasn't based on any new information."

Browne declined to discuss what, if anything, was found.

Pedro Hernandez has been charged in the slaying of Patz, one of the first missing children whose picture ever appeared on a milk carton. He remains held without bail.

Hernandez was a teenage stock clerk at the convenience store -- now an eyeglass shop -- when Etan disappeared on his way to school on May 25, 1979, a date that would later be commemorated as National Missing Children's Day. A judge in 2001 declared the boy dead, but his body has never been found.