As we first noted on Thursday, signage appeared for Gestations — "NYC's first bar for pregnant women" — on the long vacant corner of Avenue A and East Fifth Street.
Seemed pretty evident that it was some kind of gag (despite the appearance of an authentic State Liquor Authority notice) complete with a Facebook and Twitter account and outgoing phone message.
The sign attracted some attention in the media…
The Post even assigned three reporters to the story…
Per the Post:
The business hasn’t applied for a liquor license or other permits for the space, said Community Board 3 leader Susan Stetzer.
“They’re saying it’s a bar, but they haven’t applied for a liquor license.
At this point it’s nothing … Maybe it’s going to be a milk bar or a juice bar,” she said.
The fake bar also attracted attention in Times Square …
[Via Facebook]
The broker for the storefront told us on Friday that the building's landlord rented the space for the sign for a month. (It's for a bar-finding app called Bartendr.) So you have about three and a half more weeks left to be amused, shocked, annoyed, disgusted, whatever, etc.
East Village Pharmacy moved from here to 41 Avenue A in early 2011.
The storefront has remained empty since then…
[Photo from Wednesday]
According to another store owner on the block, a veterinary's office will open here.
14 comments:
Sorry pregnant ladies and fetuses, I guess you will just have to keep going to the 13th Step for happy hour.
The sad part is that this could actually happen in Park Slope and no one would bat an eye.
3 1/2 more weeks? The joke was old after 5 minutes.
How is it possible for landlords to sit on properties like this for three or four years? This is, of course, why they're able to charge bananas rents. The city should levy some kind of penalty for sitting on an empty property as a means of pushing insane rents for storefronts down, ideally before ours is a neighborhood entirely of bars.
I absolutely thought it was real, what with all the debauchery around here. Nihilism/narcissism of the 70's and 80's seems archaic compared to today. At least back then people had a place to live.
This was not a funny joke. People's lives have been destroyed around here.
Rats. I was looking forward to this place. I was even thinking of getting pregnant!
I agree that this was not a funny joke at all, especially the fake SLA notice. The fact that the CB 3 District Manager had to take to respond to this is absurd. I know people will say "hey calm down I was just a joke", but dealing with the real onslaught of nightlife establishments is bad enough, but dealing with fake ones is offensive. I think the broker, the landlord and the developers of the app are idiots.
I love that the whole thing is a publicity stunt for an app and EVGrieve got the name of the app wrong. Branding failure?
Somewhere in Stuy Town 300 mom zombs are hysterical.
The idiocy of this pathetic "ad" represents frat-boy humor at its abysmal worst.
3 Post reporters on the story and yet they can't tell us which advertising agency came up with this lame shtick??
when it was the pharmacy it was fun to make the automatic door open even when the gate was down.
I think the reason this corner has been vacant so long is that it has posted a "no food" notice on its window.
Worst storefront-based attempt at humor since "Hot Chicks room"
GTFO
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