Singage for Paint Puff "N" Peace arrived this week at 128 Second Ave. just south of St. Mark's Place...
This is the latest outpost for the cannabis shop, which first opened in East Harlem last fall —and with endorsements via Nick Cannon and Fat Joe, per The City. (Paint Puff 'N' Peace takes the EV space from the Village Dream Tattoo and Piercing shop.)
New York legalized marijuana use last spring. However, as The City points out: "Bureaucratic delays — made worse when Andrew Cuomo resigned as governor in August — have pushed back the timeline by months and the city may not see many (or any) pot establishments open their doors for sales in 2022."
As a workaround in the short-term, businesses offer services such as a curated cannabis concierge service with membership fees, such as at the Empire Cannabis Clubs that opened on Allen Street in January. Higher Empire, which is opening at 71 First Ave. between Fourth Street and Fifth Street, the business is described as a "cannabis club and delivery service."
This Bloomberg CityLab article from last week addresses many of the challenges budding cannabis entrepreneurs are facing...
Like most states, New York's law requires that dispensaries be a certain distance from schools and houses of worship. These and other expected regulatory requirements for where dispensaries can be located pose a particular challenge in dense New York City, where entrepreneurs say some of the neighborhoods with high expected demand — like Harlem and the Lower East Side — offer very limited available space.
And!
The geography puzzle is just one of a number of real estate hurdles for prospective marijuana entrepreneurs, who face a morass of potential regulatory obstacles — and fierce competition. Although New York's Office of Cannabis Management has released some baseline guidance, like the storefront distancing requirements, there are still a lot of unknowns.
Top photo by Steven; second photo by Derek Berg
7 comments:
They already have a process for liquor licenses, cannabis stores should have just been included.
To 7:31 AM. The rules for liquor licenses in the EV and LES are a sham. The Community Boards no longer post oversaturated area lists and liquor licenses are issued to lying restaurant owners with shady lawyers all the time. Same thing will happen with weed stores. Predatory capitalism usually wins, quality of life issues for locals be damned. https://evgrieve.com/search/label/things%20that%20are%20saturated
The landlord of this property is Icon Realty, which is owned by Terrance Lowenberg. He is a horrible person. He put Stage Diner out of business at this location. Stage was there for decades, one of the wonderful Polish joints. They had a problem with their gas line, and instead of allowing them to get it corrected, Icon kicked them out.
Are people consuming product in the store? If so, curious about surrounding/above neighbors perspective.
I hope that the East Village doesn't become saturated with weed stores like it did with bars. Some are OK but not several on every block. Would it help to form a group to regularly attend meetings and lobby our Community Board and Ms. Rivera for more reasonable density limits beyond distance from schools and churches? Or is that just wishful thinking?
Anon@1:14 pm - I live on that block, and we've endured everything but a plague of locusts. If we got through explosions and years with mobs of drunken crusties, we'll survive a weed store.
We live directly across the street from the new one in west Harlem. I have a 16 year old boy who is struggling with thc dependency so not happy.
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