Union Sq. Park and its environment misplaced a lot of their good-times juice after common restaurant Espresso Store on Union Sq. West closed in 2018 and Blue Water Grill adopted it into historical past in 2019.
It by no means felt fairly the identical even with big-name retailers on East 14th Avenue and the ever-popular Greenmarket nonetheless drawing crowds.
However now the park’s on a retail- and restaurant-leasing roll. As reported by the Union Sq. Partnership, storefronts across the park are 82% occupied, a 68% leap over the past quarter of 2024.
Main new tenants both in place or opening within the subsequent few months embody eating places Seahorse, Flight Membership and Smashy.
An enormous outpost of common steakhouse STK is coming to the nook of 200 Park Avenue South, which was darkish since Elizabeth Arden Crimson Door Spa shuttered in 2020.
Pop-up retailers are filling long-vacant ground-floor areas, together with Mets Home at 1 Union Sq. West. Higher flooring have been snatched up by Fred Astaire Dance Studio at 857 Broadway and nutrition-care supplier Nourish at 853 Broadway.
The realm has seen 28% extra visits by workplace staff because the first quarter of 2024, in response to the Partnership.
Though the group’s report didn’t point out it, a big morale-booster was the dismantling late final yr of the scaffolding at Barnes & Noble at 33 E. seventeenth St. on the park’s northern finish, which had darkened the town’s largest B&N for years.
And on the workplace entrance, the comparatively small Union Sq. submarket lags. Cushman & Wakefield studies its 110,000 sq. toes of leasing within the first quarter was barely under the five-year common.
Even so, not less than 20 storefronts stay darkish from 700 to over 9,000 sq. toes, particularly alongside Union Sq. East.
You’re too late to purchase any of the loft-like rental flats on the Armorie, the residential conversion by Adellco of a former publishing home at 114 E. twenty fifth St. that we wrote about just a few months in the past.
A single, unidentified purchaser (who received’t probably stay nameless for lengthy) snatched up all 20 models and the ground-floor industrial area for $71 million.
We’re informed the acquisition got here simply days after the flats have been publicly listed on the market — and within the midst of Wall Avenue turbulence over tariffs.
