Vanishing New York Backup

The western end of Bleecker Street has gone through three major upheavals since the 2000s began. 1. Skyrocketing rents and non-renewal of leases on mom-and-pop shops created the luxury chain takeover, starting in 2001 with Marc Jacobs. Those blocks went from quaint and local to high-end suburban mall in just five years. 2. It took another five to die, as those big chains departed, emptying the storefronts and leaving the street in a state of high-rent blight. 3. Recently we heard that mega-developer Brookfield Properties would take over , spending approximately $31.5 million for several retail condos to convert them into a concept, a curated consumer experience, “with Brookfield orchestrating…rather than allowing each individual shop to pursue its own agenda,” reported New York magazine. “Let’s look at this as if it’s a mall,” said Brookfield’s head of retail leasing, “even though it’s not.” Now we know what that looks like. WWD reports on the program to curate the street...

Sick of watching the small businesses in your neighborhood vanish? Here's your chance to do something about it. Come to the #SaveNYC Happy Hour: - Wednesday, October 3, from 7:00 - 9:00PM - Dream Baby Cocktail Bar, 162 - 164 Avenue B, NYC: Extended happy hour for #SaveNYC = $4 for beer and well drinks, $2 off everything else. - View Facebook invite here At long last, the Small Business Jobs Survival Act is getting a hearing . Come celebrate, meet and mingle, and strategize next steps for this important event and beyond. Jeremiah Moss and others will be speaking on the importance of this historic bill. David Eisenbach, the anti-REBNY candidate for Public Advocate, will talk about his work and what we can do to get ready for the public hearing later in October. Speaker Corey Johson Pledging Support for Small Businesses (WNYC Brian Lehrer) from Wheelhouse Communications on Vimeo .

Earlier this year I wrote in detail about the death of the great St. Denis building on 11th and Broadway, a building that should have been landmarked but wasn't, a building full of vital history -- from Alexander Graham Bell to Ulysses S. Grant, Susan B. Anthony, and a whole lot of Socialists, radicals, artists, and psychotherapists. The building was bought by Normandy Partners in 2016 and all of the tenants were removed--hundreds of small businesspeople, myself included, put out. Today, the empty building is being prepped for demolition. Crain's reported last week that Columbia Property Trust is "paying more than $70 million...to purchase a roughly 50% stake" in the property with co-owner Normandy Real Estate Partners. The plan is to tear down the St. Denis and replace it with a glass box, "182,000 square feet of boutique office space for New York’s most progressive and creative companies," according to the press release -- which calls this neighb...

About a decade ago, I had a dream that the southeast corner of 14th Street and 8th Avenue was being torn down to make room for WalMart. That didn't happen. At the time, I checked with one of the business owners (there was a popular Korean deli, a bodega, and a liquor store). He told me that the owner of the buildings had turned down offers of up to $45 million for the whole lot. But then, last year, it all went . We learned that a 10-story office tower is coming, designed by architect Gene Kaufman and developed by the Chun Woo Realty Corporation. Chun Woo Realty Corp, DNA reported last year, "has owned the two properties for around three decades...noting that redevelopment was something they’d 'been contemplating for over a decade.'" “We’re not developers who moved in and are pushing small businesses out. We’re actually the longtime permanent owners of the building, and it was actually our business,” the developer said of the deli. He didn't menti...

Now and then, the lost artifacts of vanished New York will resurface. I heard from a painter who recently moved his studio into a former woodshop's space in the East Village. In the backyard, under piles of junk, he unearthed the double-sided neon sign of the old Second Avenue Deli. Opened in 1954, the deli (and the sign) stood on the southeast corner of Second Avenue and East 10th Street until 2006, when it closed due to a rent dispute with the building's new owner. Reported the Times , "Jack Lebewohl said he faced an increase in monthly rent to $33,000 from $24,000. The space also needed substantial renovations he was unwilling to invest in without a reasonable long-term lease. His landlord told The Times that Lebewohl owed $107,000 and that eviction proceedings had started. They settled for $75,000." Comic Jackie Mason told the paper, "It's almost like wiping out Carnegie Hall. A sandwich to a Jew is just as important as a country to a Gentile....