Change seems to be happening quickly on the Bowery... or maybe not. So we thought we'd add up some of the recent developments.
Starting at East Fourth Street.
1) 2 Cooper Square
The plentiful retail space remains on the market... minus a pop-up tenant here or there, the storefront has been empty since the building officially opened in 2010.
2) 350 Bowery
The address was recently home to Gallery 151, which is now in Chelsea on West 18th Street. One reader thinks another gallery is going into the space. Anyone else hear differently?
3) Bowery at Great Jones
Downtown Auto & Tire moved away in April. There were all sorts of rumors of suitors — Eddie Bauer, Quicksilver — though no takers just yet.
4) 332 Bowery
Steve's on the Bowery closed last week. BoweryBoogie has reported that the Intermix brand is taking over the Steve's space.
5) Bowery and Bond
Jeez, The Washington Mutual closed up in March 2009 ... and the space has gone though an assortment of brokers... and remains empty...
6) 302 Bowery
The Patricia Field boutique moved a few storefronts away in the spring. The space remains on the market for $30,000 a month.
7) 319 Bowery
The Amato Opera building has sat vacant since the company closed on May 31, 2009. The new renderings are a hoot, though sadly realistic.
8) 313 Bowery
Most recently, the space was home to the Morrison Hotel Gallery and the Steven Tyler pop-up shop Riff (and once, the CBGB Gallery). BoweryBoogie got word that it will become the first East Coast Patagonia Surf Store.
9) 3 E. First St.
Loris Diran, the high-end Bowery boutique in Avalon Bowery Place, has moved away. Their assistant designer and tailor Robert Pendleton recently died due to heart failure.
10) 303 Bowery
I only just noticed that the Mischa Nicole boutique is gone... no word of a move on their website... the store opened in early 2011...
...and two quick notes south of Houston...
11) 263 Bowery
The Karl Fischer-designed building is now on the market for $5.95 million. Per the listing:
263 Bowery, located between East Houston and Stanton Streets, is a newly constructed 7-story mixed-use condominium building with three commercial condominium units totaling approximately 6,500 square feet. The combined Basement and Ground Floor commercial unit is currently vacant, while the Second Floor commercial unit is currently in contract to be leased for a 10 year term and the Third Floor unit is currently leased through 2012.
263 Bowery presents an opportunity for a retailer to establish a ground floor presence in a vibrant neighborhood that includes an array of trendy restaurants, boutique retail shops, hotels and bars.
12) 260 Bowery
Currently home to the Standard Sheetmetal Fabrication Corp. It remains on the market.
Hmmm...That's alot of retail inventory in a small corridor. And Death Star adds another 15K+ sqft. Perhaps retailers aren't quite as interested in the area as landlords think they should be.
ReplyDelete350 Bowery - Environment Furniture is expanding into this space.
ReplyDeleteGlad Mischa Nicole is gone. That place annoyed me more than all the others for some reason. Retailers can't afford these places - it's just a bunch of hicks and Euro-tourists passing through a neighborhood they've been told is 'hip' and those folks don't buy $300 t-shirts.
ReplyDeleteI know you got the info from another source, but calling a surf shop a surf STORE is kind of like calling 6th ave, "The Avenue of Americas"
ReplyDeletethe new patricia field store is amazing. and ditto on the good riddance to Mischa Nicole, horrible people & horrible clientele, was just a whole lotta neoyuck for the bowery.
ReplyDeletegalleries are definitely seeming like the best case scenario for this strip! can't stand that yucky retail and all the a-holes it attracts.
So much for the new booming Bowery! It's starting to look like the old days!
ReplyDeleteGood round-up. It's interesting to see that, despite the Bowery getting so built up and "high-ended," there really are a lot of vacant storefronts. Could this be a turning point? Are retailers finally unable or unwilling to pay ridiculous rents?
ReplyDeleteBTW, the Amato Opera sitting empty makes me saddest of all. What a shameful loss.
It's the rents, 1st and foremost. Just not worth it. The Bowery is soooo over. The lack of planning never gave it a chance. Rich people don't want to live above a bunch of bars. And bars don't want to be subject to residential tenents' rules.
ReplyDeleteAnd then, it's also about the road than it is the buildings. Try to sleep there at 4am. The big 18-wheelers roar up the block, hitting the manholes, and the buildings shake all the way along. You wake up 15 times each morning. Even if drunk hipsters magically disappeared, it's not a quiet street. Who would want to live there?
And the community board has rendered retail a constant revolving door. The SLA committee doesn't want to be constantly have all night meetings, but they approve so many establishments that none of them can turn a profit. Get some discipline, or in 10 years the Bowery will be returned to its skid row of bars and saloons that everyone hated to begin with.
Restaurants have to charge tourists prices to keep the doors open, so no one who lives or works there eats there. But tourists are only there on weekends. Look in at these establishments Sunday thru Thursday - ghost town. The psuedo government is creating their own problems... busy work that helps no one.
The businesses around Stanton are already complaining about the big hotel to come around the corner. There goes their sunlight. And soon enough they will go, too. Might as well bring back the shadows of the elevated train. Hotel tourists have never kept a gallery in business, and if the gallery is in the shadow of a 20 story hotel, what's the use? Galleries can find better and cheaper storefronts elsewhere.
There is a reason that we have such a thing as City Planning, but none of that is being utilized on the Bowery. It's quickly on its way to being lost again for another few decades.
Interesting. But... Feeling nostalgic for Patricia Field? Wasn't that part of the start of the high-end invasion?
ReplyDeleteAt this point, I would vastly prefer to see the return of the flophouses and other "dumps". The sterile, boring Midwestern architecture we are currently saddled with is strictly for hicks.
ReplyDeletepatricia field is not only affordable but also a NYC icon, and her clientele is mostlydrag queens, club kids and art stars.
ReplyDeleteit's quite literally a piece of old new york.