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Tales of Retail

By Kit Dillon 12/17/12 12:10pm

Tales of Retail

A city in chains. (CUF)

New Generic City: 172 New Chain Stores Opened in Five Boroughs Last Year

James Joyce once puzzled whether it would be possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub. As it turns out, despite having more than 22 pubs per square mile, with the help of a computer algorithm, it just barely is. Today, after The Center for an Urban Future released its fifth annual study ranking the national retailers popping up all over in New York City, it might have found a harder puzzle to solve. With a reported 24 locations per square mile, is it possible to cross New York without passing a chain store?

The report showed a 2.4 percent increase in the total number of chains over the past year, despite prominent retailers like Filene’s Basement and Betsey Johnson closing their doors. It is boom maintained by trusty stalwarts like Dunkin Donuts, which opened 18 stores in the last year for a total of 484 citywide, followed closely by Subways, with 454 locations, and despite seeming to be on every street corner, Starbucks, with a mere 272 locations. Read More

By Matt Chaban 8/15/12 2:19pm

Tales of Retail

Ready to party. (Max Carr)

Michael Weiss’ Homecoming: Brooklyn Boy Brings Express to the Fulton Mall

Much has been made of the Fulton Mall’s transformation over the past few years (not least in these pages). New shops, new sweets, new people. No one knows this better than Michael Weiss, the CEO of Express. Sure, the career garmento with slicked back white hair and severe glasses likes the location for his newest outlet, set to open this evening with a big block party outside the new store at 490 Fulton Street.

But his love for the strip goes back much farther than that. Mr. Weiss’ first job was as a management trainee and associate buyer at the old Abraham & Strauss, one of the four department stores that helped solidify the Fulton Mall as Brooklyn’s main shopping destination.

“Except in those days, it wasn’t called the Fulton Mall, it was just Fulton Street,” Mr. Weiss joked. Read More

By Matt Chaban 7/30/12 4:18pm

Tales of Retail

Turning and turning in the widening gyre. (MTA/Flickr)

Let the Great Downtown Mall Brawl Begin

So we already know Lower Manhattan is set to become a giant mall. No, we do not mean Canal Street, though that has been attracting big name investors, as well. This is instead Fulton Street, which will soon gain more than a million square feet of retail from (narrow) coast to coast: the World Financial Center, the World Trade Center, the Fulton Transit Center and the glittery new Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport (not to mention a vastly expanded Century 21—joy!).

The Journal wonders just who is going to fill all that retail space, particularly at a time when rents are up but the economy remains off? Read More

By Jess Schiewe 5/31/12 5:08pm

Tales of Retail

The International House of Pancakes: opening up in a building near you.

IHOP Opening Third Manhattan Location in Heart of West Village, Effectively Stabbing Village in Heart

Pass the syrup—and the Kleenex, because the Death of Downtown lamentations are only going to get louder as the Village gets its second IHOP.

There’s one in Harlem and one on East 14th Street, and soon there will be one in the West Village, too, at 80 Carmine Street. The International House of Pancakes has hit the Big Apple, folks, and it looks like it’s here to stay. Read More

By Matt Chaban 4/06/12 10:54am

Tales of Retail

Less of this. (DNAinfo)

In Defense of the Upper West Side Retail Rezoning: Enough With the Banks Already!

While real estate and business groups opposed the Upper West Side rezoning that places restrictions on retail establishments, James Gardener, a native of the neighborhood and The Real Deal‘s architecture critic, makes a compelling case for the legislation.

He argues that the rezoning improves not only the retail mix on the stretch, not always great, but also the street life, that most essential of New York experiences, a landmark more important even than the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, perhaps. For after all, it is at street level where so many of us live, not in these hokey locales. Read More

By Matt Chaban 3/21/12 11:25am

Tales of Retail

510 Fifth Avenue gets Fresh. (Nicholas Strini/PropertyShark)

O, Canada, Where Did You Get that Dress: Joe Fresh Takes Manhattan, But Will New Yorkers Buy It?

The kaleidoscope of New York City shopping bags is a mesmerizing thing, a language. The thrifty carry some variation of red—red and black for H&M, red and white for Uniqlo, red, white and black for Century 21. The weak-dollar-spending tourists have the navy and naked bodies of the Gap and Abercrombie, the star-crossed lovers the teal of Tiffany’s. For the fashion-forward, Small, Medium and Large brown bags.

Then, last fall, a bright orange bag began to appear in the overburdened arms of Manhattan shoppers. Inside were the dreams of all the other bags put together. It was not some down-market Hermés, however, but an upstart brand called Joe Fresh.

If that moniker conjures visions of the grocery store, you’re not far off. Joe Fresh was launched in 2006 by Loblaws, a chain somewhere between Trader Joe’s (they have a great in-house brand, approaching Newman’s Own) and D’Agostinos (the selection is nice, but it’s no Fairway). If that does not seem like a strange enough place to find the next great fashion line, Joe Fresh, and Loblaws, happens to be Canadian. Read More

By Matt Chaban 1/18/12 11:40am

Tales of Retail

Shiny new sales. (Brownstoner)

Discounts Galore! Century 21 May Bring Bargains to Fulton Mall

If the Fulton Mall is being transformed, it is only so much. The strip is being glammed up, stocked with major national retailers, at the cost of the mom and pops who have called the mall home for decades.

Still, things are not changing so much. As previously, pretentiously noted, Smith Street it ain’t, nor is it going to be. This is still a discount strip. From H&M to Target, the Gap to the almost-Filene’s, the newcomers have been far from high end—not counting the hamburgers. For further proof of the trend toward the same, welcome Century 21 to the neighborhood. Read More

By Matt Chaban 1/12/12 10:51am

Tales of Retail

Shrink to fit. (wilm23/Flickr)

UWS Fights Back Against Chain Stores

Maybe the Fulton Mall just needs some zoning changes to save its mom and pop shops. That’s what they’re doing on the Upper West Side, tired of all the giant Duane Reades and Chases. New zoning requirements would limit the size of stores on Columbus and Amsterdam avenues, protecting the character of the neighborhood and possibly discouraging national retailers, who tend to prefer bigger spaces.

Not surprisingly, landlords are not happy about the proposal, according to The Journal. Read More

By Matt Chaban 1/11/12 3:05pm

Tales of Retail

CityPoint takes shape.

Whose Mall Is It Anyway: Will Brooklyn Flock to Fulton Street’s New Chain Stores?

Joseph, a slender 19-year-old from Fort Greene, stood inside Downtown Pawn Shop Sunday afternoon turning an almost-new Nokia flip phone over in his hands. On either side of him were glass display cases, chipped and fluorescent.

Those before him held more new and used phones, neatly arrayed. Beside that were purses in an array of colors and material. Across the way was perfume—Lilac for Women, Yacht Man Chocolate—and more jewelry than the Zales across the street, in maybe one-fifth the space. Bomber jackets hung on the wall, besides po sters of President Obama, still smiling, celebrating his inauguration. Bills from every Caribbean nation were taped up next to that. In the back was a tattoo parlor and an optometrist. “Designer Frames Start at $59.99.”

Like generations of Brooklynites before him, Joseph had come to the Fulton Mall to do some shopping. Some historians credit the centuries old strip with pioneering urban department store shopping, with the opening of Abraham & Weschler in 1865 and the many stores that followed, all now long gone but for the Neo-Grec and Beaux Arts temples to retail they erected.

When he arrived on the mall this day, Joseph had passed by the T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T and MetroPCS outlets and come here for his new-enough phone. “They don’t want so much here,” Joseph said, a Dodgers cap—L.A., not Brooklyn—resting on his head. “It’s a good deal.”

But for how much longer? It is getting to be that they want more and more on the Fulton Mall. Just like the rest of Brooklyn before it. Read More

By Matt Chaban 1/10/12 7:42pm

Tales of Retail

What to do with those once-beautiful windows? (Brownstoner)

Detail-Oriented Retail: Fixing the Fulton Mall Up

It is getting hard to catalog all the new changes on the Fulton Mall in recent years. There is the new benches and sidewalks, rebuilt after decades of neglect. The rezoning and the thousands of new apartments borne in on the tides of its land rush. A new mall, CityPoint, maybe with a Target inside, as well as the national retailers finally flooding into the old department stores alongside Macy’s: Aeropostale, Express, H&M, TJ Maxx. And who could forget the crown jewel, Shake Shack.

While people worry about the future of the mall and who might shop there—indeed, it is the subject of a feature in tomorrow’s paper—it still has much of the polyglot look it has had for decades, even more so given the new mix of national shops among the mom and pops with their riotous signs.

Just as it worked for the rezoning in 2005 and the streetscaping a year later, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership is in the early stages of  creating new standards for the storefronts on Fulton Mall, according to people involved with the project. While still very much preliminary, some form of new regulations is being developed by the local business improvement district in partnership with the Department of City Planning to spruce up the walls of the Fulton Mull. Read More