Manhattan’s most famous shopping districts now hold a wildly outsized share of the borough’s empty storefronts, the Manhattan Institute newsletter The Bigger Apple argued in its February 6 edition, drawing on figures attributed to the Real Estate Board of New York to make the case that the old model of the “retail corridor” no longer works in an era when shoppers are glued to their phones.
Citing a New York Post report from that week, the newsletter said that Upper Fifth Avenue, Times Square, Herald Square and the Financial District together make up a relatively small portion of Manhattan’s overall retail inventory yet, according to REBNY, account for 60 percent of all the borough’s available storefronts and carry the most vacancies of more than 10,000 square feet. The newsletter presented those figures as the Post’s and REBNY’s findings rather than as its own reporting.
The newsletter framed the data as evidence of a broader shift it said is visible across the city, pointing to what it described as the gleaming but mostly empty stores under the Oculus at the World Trade Center and to struggling retail near Penn Station. Something about “old-fashioned ‘retail corridors,'” the publication wrote, “isn’t working anymore.”
The piece also revisited West 34th Street, which it said Crain’s reported on last fall in an account of the corridor’s “dilapidated former grandeur.” On some blocks there, the newsletter said, as many as 40 percent of storefronts sat empty, and despite what it called some glimmers of hope, it described the strip as still struggling. Those characterizations are the newsletter’s summary of the Crain’s reporting; the underlying figures are attributed to that outlet.
The Bigger Apple set the local vacancy data against an overseas comparison, with its author writing that he had been reading about New York’s retail troubles from a cafe in the Dubai Mall, which he called perhaps the world’s most successful retail location, somewhere between his 6,000th and 7,000th step inside it. The contrast, the newsletter suggested, underscored how radically urban shopping has changed as most people have become tethered to their mobile devices. The full post is published as part of the Manhattan Institute’s The Bigger Apple newsletter.
