Union Square Partnership Annual Meeting, May 7

ByDon

If you’d like to attend the Union Square Partnership’s Annual Meeting on May 7th, click here.

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  • BlueWater Grill and Republic Destined to Close

    ByDon

    Because the rent is to damned high….here are the details, courtesy of Eater.com:

    After over 20 years in Union Square, noodle shop Republic and seafood restaurant Blue Water Grill will both close by the end of the year. The culprit is outrageously high rent, with Blue Water Grill facing $2 million-plus annually, Bloomberg reports.

    It’s part of a larger issue that Bloomberg breaks down in greater detail: Restaurants, like Union Square Cafe, which faced this same issue in 2014, open in less desirable neighborhoods with affordable 10- to 25-year leases. Then, in that time period, those restaurants contribute to the neighborhood increasing in value, which in turn causes landlords to raise rents to unsustainable highs once a lease is up.

    Specifically, at Republic, the 3,800-square-foot restaurant went for $220,000 a year in 1995. Now, owner Jonathan Morr will vacate the space three-and-a-half years early so he can split the difference between what [the landlord] gets from us and what he’ll get from the next tenant, and call it a day, Morr tells Bloomberg. Marty Feinberg, of Winner Communications, which owns Republic’s building, says that taxes on it have gone up from $90,000 to $476,000 since the mid-’90s. (It’s not clear in the wording whether the landlord pays the taxes or it’s the responsibility of Republic as part of the lease agreement.)

    Even restaurants with a lot of firepower behind them feel the squeeze. Tilman Fertitta, the tycoon behind Landry’s restaurant group, now owns Blue Water Grill, but still the rent increase to over $2 million a year is an amount at which can’t be successful,according to a Landry’s spokesperson. (This is also the group that just closed Isabella’s after 30 years on the Upper West Side.) The restaurant is currently searching for a new space. Uber-successful restaurateur Danny Meyer’s flagship Union Square Café” named after the very area it can no longer afford” vacated in 2015 after its rent increased fivefold over a 30-year period.

    “That area is going to have to become a food desert” says realtor Leslie Siben of LB Realty Services LLC, because] no normal restaurateur with any experience would touch that as it is now.

    This doom and gloom is met with a depressing solution: more food halls. Optimal Spaces broker Stephen Sunderland tells Bloomberg that it’s an appealing scenario for restaurants for its limited risk and lower costs to open” or close if needed. On the landlord and developer side, Smorgasburg co-founder Jonathan Butler recently commented on an unrelated panel that every developer wants a food hall at the bottom of their building or to anchor their big project.

    There is no set date yet for the closures of Republic and Blue Water Grill. Stay tuned for more.

  • 14th St. Busway Appears to Be Real, 13th St. Bike Lane Permanent

    ByDon

    From Metro:

    The L train “slowdown” will come with bus priority on 14th Street after all.

    The de Blasio administration will ban private through-traffic on 14th Street between Third and Ninth avenues as part of a new pilot street design to help speed up buses during the L train’s Canarsie tunnel reconstruction, according to a draft release of the plans obtained by amNewYork.

    But the changes won’t come until June, more than a month after the subway rehabilitation work begins.

    Under the city’s plans, the new stretch of 14th Street will consist of four lanes, two in each direction: the center lanes will be dedicated to bus and truck traffic, while the outer curbside lanes will be reserved for truck loading and local traffic looking to make pickups, drop-offs or to access garages along the block.

    Private vehicles in these lanes will be required to turn right, off the street, at the next possible opportunity and left turns will be barred. The city, in the draft release, said it drew inspiration from the King Street project in Toronto, where similar vehicular restrictions were put in place to improve cripplingly slow streetcar service on the major city artery.

    A City Hall spokesman did not immediately respond to questions on the draft plan and declined to confirm its details.

    New M14 Select Bus Service will roll out with the street changes in June, along with additional painted pedestrian space at intersections. The city plans to use automated cameras to enforce the rules of the road.

    The city Department of Transportation will conduct “significant outreach,” including to the five different community boards overlapping 14th Street, and will promote education campaigns for people who commute on the block, the draft release states. There doesn’t appear to be any space dedicated for parking in the plan.

    The city also plans to announce that bike infrastructure projects on Manhattan’s 12th and 13th streets, as well as Grand Street in Brooklyn, will be made permanent. Grand Street’s protected bike lanes will be adjusted to add more loading zones and metered parking, and to “help accommodate the needs of industrial businesses along this section of the corridor,” according to the draft release.

    Under the original plan, the city had pitched a bus-only corridor along 14th Street for 17 hours of the day, but from the outset, the DOT had assured that local pickups and drop-offs would be accommodated.

    The city has been criticized for dragging its feet on the fate of 14th Street. The new design comes just days before L train tunnel reconstruction begins Friday evening. Advocates have long called for a dedicated busway on 14th Street to help alleviate potentially dangerous overcrowding at stations during the work, which will take place during nights and weekends for 15 to 18 months.

    During the night-and-weekend work, the MTA will run three trains per hour, at 20-minute intervals, between the Bedford Avenue station and through Manhattan. That service schedule translates to an 80% reduction in trains at certain hours. The authority advised riders this week that they may not be able to even fit on the first trains rolling into their stations.

  • Girl Scout Cookies for Sale

    ByDon

    The Girl Scout troop serving girls in the city’s homeless shelters that captivated New Yorkers last year will be selling cookies again in Union Square this week.

    Troop 6000 will hold its cookie sale at Kellogg’s NYC Cafe, where members had their successful inaugural sale last year. Long lines quickly formed as news spread about the troop, and the girls ended up selling 36,000 boxes.
    This year, the troop has a goal of selling 60,000 boxes. The girls will be at the store from 1 to 6 p.m. on April 22 to April 26.

    The troop started at a homeless shelter in Queens in 2017, but grew to include hundreds of girls at 15 shelters across the five boroughs, the city announced last year. The troop is led by women and mothers also living in homeless shelters and holds meetings every week at the participating shelters.