Thursday, July 25, 2013

East 14th Street corridor now nearly business-free ahead of new development


[Photo by Hawkeye Bulletin]

The storefronts continue to disappear on East 14th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B. Yesterday, Rainbow finally shut its doors. The junior retailer joins now-former block neighbors The Blarney Cove... Bargain Express ... Petland ... the ABC Animal Hospital ...

One business is actually staying on the block: the laundromat, which is moving east ...



... to the space Ray's East Side 99-cent store had before moving to the Copper Building.


[Photo by EVG reader Michael]

After the laundromat moves, just Rite Aid will remain between Avenue A and 520 East 14th St. (not part of the land grab).

A still-unspecified new development will eat up much of the block. As we first reported last December, eight parcels consisting of 222 Avenue A and 504 - 530 E. 14th St. (excluding No. 520) were leased for a 99-year period by the respective owner of East Village 14 LLC.

Turns out the identity of "East Village 14 LLC" was right under our noses this whole time.

Back in April, The Real Deal examined the late real-estate mogul Sol Goldman's $6 billion portfolio. As part of their reporting:

And in November, city property records show, Gary Barnett of Extell Development signed a 99-year lease worth $35.14 million to rent eight Goldman-owned properties across the street from Stuyvesant Town, including 516 East 14th Street, 530 East 14th Street and 222 Avenue A.

Extell has been busy with such high-profile luxury properties around the city like One57 ... an "ultra-luxe condo tower" at 217 West 57th Street ... and One Hudson Yards.

So. You can likely count on something really tall and luxurious here one day.


Previously on EV Grieve:
East 14th Street exodus continues

The disappearing storefronts of East 14th Street

[Updated with correction] 8-lot parcel of East 14th Street primed for new development

Bargain Express has closed on East 14th Street

42 comments:

  1. Oh my God we are doomed.

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  2. This is an improvement, but for the wrong reason.

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  3. Ken from Ken's KitchenJuly 25, 2013 at 10:09 AM

    This is not welcome news.

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  4. I don't believe 14th Street was covered by the rezoning a few years ago. Anyone know what the height restrictions are in this stretch ?

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  5. Isn't this between B and C, not A and B?

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  6. This seems like a reasonable space for redevelopment. And we can never have too much housing for the billionaires and their children and whores, who are sometimes one and the same.

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  7. No, this is most definitely between A&B.

    This is my stretch. (I live around the corner.) It makes me profoundly sad. But I am glad that the laundromat is still there.

    Bring on the buyouts.

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  8. Gee Lets leave it the way it was shabby little ghetto shops peddling junk to the project folk and not to leave out the Blarney Cove a pub catering to those in the final stages of an alcoholic psychosis. Wrecking ball were art thou?

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  9. Oh fantastic. Hopefully the developers can bring all of the excitement of the MPD but with none of those ugly old buildings.

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  10. Anon 3:54 just die.

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  11. I wish the city would make the developer put in an
    entrance to the L train at Ave B.

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  12. One of the ugliest blocks in the East Village anyway.

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  13. @Anon 3:54

    These "junk peddlers" are people who live in our community and have families to support. Perhaps not chic, but Bargain Bazaar had really good prices on things I didn't want to pay a lot for like shower curtains, cleaning supplies, glasses for parties, etc. Take your classist bile you spew and shove it back up your ass.

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  14. I second the disappearance of Anon 3:54

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  15. Stop complaining folks, Anon 3:54 is the future.

    Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated

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  16. Maybe the new Russian Billionaires will help keep Odessa afloat.
    BTW definitely between A and B -- starts at corner of A and moves east.

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  17. Yeah, yeah, we've heard it all before. If we don't like it we should move... Not sure why people like 3:54 move to the city in the first place if he has such contempt for it.

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  18. For the record I anon 3:54 moved to the city in 1972 lived through its worst periods of crime and poor services paying my taxes all along. The property was for sale it was private property bought. What gets developed there will be within the strict NYC zoning laws that apply. New development will bring construction jobs more housing and yes residents who go to work spend in the neighborhood and pay taxes so the neighborhood mooch class can have apartments with free Con ED for the average of 434 a month. The junk stores sold worthless crap to poor people at high mark ups. Contempt for the city? your as blind as the day is long I don't want to revisit the 70's maybe you want the next Detroit then cry for a Federal Govt bail out that will have a snowballs chance these days

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  19. Anonymous said...
    I don't believe 14th Street was covered by the rezoning a few years ago. Anyone know what the height restrictions are in this stretch ?

    JULY 25, 2013 AT 11:27 AM


    That block is zoned C1-6A which means a commercial FAR of 2.0 and residential FAR of 4.0. The residential equivalent zoning is R7-A which is what the buildings that line Avenues A and B are zoned as.

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  20. One of you anti development types go tell the construction workers at the Jefferson they don't deserve a job and a paycheck to feed their families its more important to preserve the ambience of ghetto as the shabby chic. Tenants in Sty town are more than happy with the clean up of 14th street

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  21. 3:54's usage of terms like "shabby", "ghetto", "peddling junk", "project folk" and "alcoholic psychosis" make me sad and angry.

    I'm glad the commenters before me articulated my feelings beautifully!

    I wonder if 3:54 was a woman though. You know, the kind you pass on the street talking loudly into their iPhones blurting out the typical, "LIKE..", "But Um" speak. Or if a dude, the kind that wishes he were a Kennedy (but is really a day-trader in Midtown).

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  22. 11:27am -- 80ft height cap. Here's a photo of what's likely, with zoning details:

    http://savethelowereastside.blogspot.com/2013/06/face-new-ev.html

    "Hail nothing, full of nothing. Nothing is with thee."

    It's over. How could the new know or understand? There's nothing here left to show them. Have they ever known any space that is not owned for consumption? How'd they ever know there was ever anything else?

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  23. anon 4:46

    Wishing I should die? What went wrong yesterday missed your trip to the Methadone clinic and chance to nod in the park making you grumpy..

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  24. What is the real improvement here exactly? More unaffordable "luxury" apartments? Replacing a non problematic bar with another woo-centric bar? This is progress?

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  25. anon at 5:16pm yesterday suggests an ave B stop for the L...a fine idea, but unlikely given the flood map.

    An easy improvement that has never been done that from an engineering and cost perspective should be achievable is adding a staircase to the existing 1st ave stop at Ave A. The station already runs that entire block underground and for the life of me I've never understood why a card only entrance there has never been part of the MTA's capital plan. Simply creating an access that one block east would be a boon for the EV.

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  26. Anon 8:45am "The junk stores sold worthless crap to poor people at high mark ups."

    What?!? They sold basic needs at a discount.

    If you didn't like those stores, that's of course your right, and your right to say so, but to mouth any old falsehood that comes to your mind discredits you -- if your "project folk" remark didn't already. (Stuy Town is a "project" too, you know.) So who's welcoming the upscale future? Racist purveyors of falsehoods -- like developers who distort every bit of history to make their selfish goals look like virtues, and any other human value be damned.

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  27. anon 10:02
    If those comments pass as articulation beautifully said then I dare say you are challenged to understand the difference from shit and shinola. I do admit the Barley Cove was a non problematic dive bar (need fewer dive bars in EV) however I would never stick my hand in the peanut bowl there.Project folk puts it politely..how about gang bangers drug dealers or thugs.No day trader and met Bobby as a kid before he was murdered.

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  28. OH, I get it. So yesterday's 3:54pm and today's 8:54am (and 9:56) is just an old-fashioned d*ck and not a recent transplant. Got it.

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  29. Anon 8:45

    Two summers ago I took a neighborhood kid for shoes my birthday gift we went to Rainbow she picked out a pair for thirty dollars I wanted to take her over to Union Square and buy them out of a store there she did not want me to spend more money the shoes lasted three days I grant you the paper products and cleaners are a discounted bargain.

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  30. I Buy Only The Best. Because I'm Worth It.July 26, 2013 at 1:13 PM

    I've been sharing the animosity that most of the people replying to Anon 3:54 but was not quite able to wrap my head around just why I disliked "his kind" so much. Now it hit me -- his comments project the antithesis of the view of economic poverty shared by many of us who moved to and lived in the EV.

    Instead of thinking about how to fix the problems caused by decades of poverty and neglect, Anon 3:54's solution is to just sweep the "trash" into the next undesirable location and make way for the "good taxpayers" who will then bring in mo' money while enjoying their private property. He ignores that lots of "good taxpayers" already moved into this neighborhood because it was affordable to them at a time when surrounding areas were not. I moved here in the 70s (that Anon 3:54 reminds us were so awful) when I was a grad student at NYU because it was close and affordable; note the word "affordable" because nothing was "cheap" on my student's stipend.

    Anyhow, the deity of the day is "private property" as Anon 3:54 notes so banally. The steamroller of capital has arrived at 14th St and it doesn't brake for animals so don't let it squash you. The "East Village" is indeed dead. Welcome to the southeastern edge of the Manhattan Mall.

    Ha ha. Just kidding. I love my new masters, same as the old ones.

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  31. Developers marketing campaigns may be over the top as quite a few are making some of them actually funny.Developers are not in the virtue business that's for the bell ringers with a kettle. Developers are for profit they risk capital on a building wanting a return. They bring new product to market generate jobs and generally increase the property tax base they are not Saints
    but they serve a productive purpose in keeping a city alive growing and not falling into decay. Not everybody is Mother Theresa nor should they be

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  32. I buy only the best..(maybe)
    Interesting comments on my "kind" I dare say. So 70's you were down here grad schooling while I did the same tour on the upper west side Morningside Heights just as broke as you without a stipend just a scholarship made available from evil wealthy people. Never used the term trash so why the misquotes? True I have no pity in my blackened heart for those who do little to uplift themselves wanting the constant unending ride in the wagon pulled by others generation to generation. Private property you mock it sir but without the right to it there is no liberty. “The pillars of our prosperity are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.” Thomas Jefferson The founders new this well and yes the time of five dollar "mug" money for a kid was awful.

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  33. 1:31pm -- I agree, developers do have a useful function. But "decay" is not adequate to the complexity and vitality of this neighborhood's past, development is not the only function, and I wish developers had plied their function in places already vapid, not spreading their homogeneity everywhere.

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  34. To paraphrase and answer Anonymous 1.31 PM. From a great movie :

    ”Developers are not animals! They're human beings!”

    “They are? Have you ever eaten with one? “

    I truly miss Pete’s-a-Place (Tony) and the Stuyvesant Convenience Store.

    http://evgrieve.com/2011/02/whats-left-of-stuyvesant-grocery-and.html

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  35. Small/local business qualify as decay?!

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  36. I can see Rob's argument that development must be balanced by many factors and EV is rich in valuable buildings and places not to be tampered with lightly thus the community board but this strip along 14th street the source of this blog and following interesting discourse was nothing more then a guant dog needing to be put out of it's misery..I miss the electric Circus but what can you do.

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  37. there used to be another L train stop east of first avenue. i don't remember if it was avenue A or B and i don't remember when they closed it off.
    i seem to have lost my sense of time, of when things happened. time flies so quickly now.

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  38. Sorry blue glass, but there has never been another L train stop--or exit for that matter--east of 1st Avenue.

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  39. 3:33, you win the metaphor prize. Too bad that gaunt dog, a unique rescue mutt, will be replaced with an outrageously, needlessly expensive purebred of the passing fashion, much like every other member of its breed. Prince will be loved and will give a job to a dog-walker, for the sake of which we're all supposed to forget about how great Rover was.

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  40. Actually there are about 20 L train stops east of First Avenue, but they all happen to be in Brooklyn and Queens.

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