Next week (June 18 to June 22), Mechanical equipment and work will continue at the 17th and 18th floor levels. The superstructure concrete work will be completed on the building by the end of the month. Deliveries for the internal systems of the building have been ongoing and will continue, although they should not greatly affect the flow of pedestrian and road traffic. The crane on site is scheduled for demobilization on Saturday, the 25th.
The following week (June 25 to June 29), we will be working on the machine room levels on the 17th and 18th floors. Deliveries for the internal systems of the building have been ongoing and will continue, although they should not greatly affect the flow of pedestrian and road traffic.
This weekend the site will be open on Saturday, June 16th for superstructure related activities between the work hours of 7AM and 5PM as permitted by the City. To control noise levels within the site, work activities will be limited to working on the mechanical systems of the building and using the crane and equipment to support activities. Safety horns are used, and required by law, to coordinate lifting with the crane and to alert the workers of the danger overhead. We have directed the operators to limit the use of horns to one short sounding and to use the crane later in the day so as to avoid any excess noise.
Certified closed: Recess, the angular coffee and snack shop on the corner of University and 10th. It lasted only about six months.
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.
New near Union Square, SONA reimagines the wonders of Indian fare in a space that evokes a bygone era of a boisterous yet elegant India—all within the heart of New York City. Visit at 36 East 20th St.
The food hall inside the Zero Irving building and 14th St. and Irving Place didn’t last long, but now it will bounce back as a *different* food hall, this time sponsored by TimeOut, which has a winning example in Dumbo.
Here’s the rundown of vendors that will arrive next month.
