“I felt exhilarated, just the fact that I could be in the pool,” he said. Shirley Fearon, who had also campaigned for the pool for years, was the other. At night, it’s most cloudy and temps will drop to the low 60s.Īlonzo de Castro wanted to be the first person in a new pool in the northeast Bronx, and he was. It’s a partly sunny day with temps in the low 70s. “In some cases, they were taking the space for marketing, knowing they weren’t going to be profitable stores. “Retail rents had gotten too high,” said Jeffrey Gural, the chairman of GFP Real Estate, which owns several SoHo buildings. Some new retailers have moved in, as have start-ups that have taken office space, though often for less money on shorter leases than were common before the pandemic. Property owners and neighborhood business leaders agree that there is reason for optimism. “But things look a lot better than they did in that moment.” What played out in the economic free-fall of the pandemic was “a reminder that success can be very fragile and things can go down as well as up,” he said. “The city was deserted, the block was deserted, the stores were shut.” After the Black Lives Matter protests, some stores covered their windows with plywood. “In the spring of 2020, there was an apocalyptic feeling when I was walking Sashi on the block,” he said. Fortunately for them, Greene Street is close to home: It dead-ends across West Houston Street from Easterly’s apartment. Easterly has had reason to go there regularly, walking his dog Sashi, a Tibetan terrier. This succinct assessment came from Carlos Garcia, the manager of the locally owned clothing store Mystique Boutique, on Broadway: “Without tourists, it’s dead down here.”Įasterly’s impressions from last year served as a postscript to a website and a 2016 academic paper about Greene Street that he wrote with two colleagues. Pandemic travel restrictions have kept them away, and now employees far outnumber shoppers in most boutiques. Although SoHo and neighboring NoHo were second only to Fifth Avenue in total retail revenue in 2016, according to a report by HR & A Advisors, SoHo retailers had become dependent on tourists. The stores were already facing challenges, given the erosion of brick-and-mortar retailing. The current asking price for a SoHo storefront is $274 a square foot, down from $350 before the pandemic, according to the real estate services firm Cushman and Wakefield.Īnd no Manhattan neighborhood saw its offices empty out faster in the pandemic. “For Lease” signs hang in one storefront after another now that more than 40 stores have closed, among them outposts of brands like Frye, Missoni and Victoria’s Secret. My colleague Matthew Haag looked at the SoHo neighborhood more broadly and wrote the pandemic had left it the hardest-hit commercial district in the hardest-hit city, at least in the United States. Then the pandemic swept in, and Easterly worried that the block was nose-diving as he watched retailers move out.
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