FROZEN IN TIME: Bergdorf Goodman's Building On A Fast Track For Landmarking

Yesterday, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing to clear out a backlog of proposed landmark designation for over a hundred buildings in New York City, among them, The building that houses Bergdorf Goodman at 754 Fifth Avenue. While over 60 buildings were rejected for various reasons, the Bergdorf's building was included in a group to be prioritized for a final vote by the end of 2016. The store itself, which holds an extremely long-term lease on the location, has been fairly quiet about the developments, but the owner owner of the property is known to oppose a landmark designation.
Wouldn't it be a prestigious honor to have the building protected and singled out for its architectural contribution to the city?
Well, sure, but it's not that simple.
Once the building has been declared a landmark, it precludes any further alteration to its exterior, which can be a challenge when it houses a thriving business like Bergdorf's which may want to make upgrades and renovations to suit its needs. Currently the store is finishing up a major alteration to its 57th Street façade for its new jewelry salon (pictured above) which would not be permitted after a landmark designation. Occasionally, the commission requires that owners return buildings to their original state as much as possible, which can incur great additional expense. Alterations for business purposes are not entirely unheard of, however. During the 1990s, the landmarked Rockefeller Center got a special dispensation to substantially increase the size of its store windows on its Fifth Avenue side after a lengthy series of discussions with the commission. Ralph Lauren's flagship boutique at Madison Avenue and 72nd Street in the landmarked Rhineland Mansion was also substantially altered to create store windows and entrances when it was opened in the 1980s. In both cases, however, the original building materials have been carefully stored and numbered in the unlikely event that they would be returned to their original positions to restore the buildings' original design.
For its part, Bergdorf's exterior is not in its original state either. The building was constructed on the site of the Vanderbilt Mansion, but the store did not initially occupy it in its entirety when it moved in in 1928 to the northern portion of the building with its entrance on 58th Street. The Fifth Avenue storefront was divided amongst several stores (as seen in the image below compared with its current state) which Bergdorf's progressively consumed, eventually taking over all of them by the early 1970s except for Van Cleef & Arpels which still exists on the first floor of the building's southeastern corner. What might keep the building from being landmarked is the major redesign of the Fifth Avenue side of the building which erased the disparate storefronts and installed a unified facade and introduced the big display windows we see there today. Unfortunately, the re-design reflects the post-modern architectural style that was popular at the time featuring outsized detailing free of the kind of refined, carved decoration found on the rest of the building. Now it looks glaringly out of scale particularly on the grand entrance with its arched window and oversized keystone and the large cartouche featuring the store's main sign.
The architectural inconsistency on it's biggest exterior wall might discourage the commission from landmarking the building, especially because the prospects of the store submitting to a restoration of the old facade are essentially nonexistent —if it were even feasible to do that at all. Of course, the commission could vote to landmark it regardless of any alterations because of Bergdorf Goodman's prominence in the city's history and its retail industry. We should know what happens by the end of the year, if not before.

Landmarks Commission Acts On Backlog Properties (NYC Landmarks Commission)

Image: Museum of the City of New York

Bergdorf Goodman's current 5th Avenue storefront including 1980s redesign as well as recent alterations to windows at Van Clef & Arpels

REAL ESTATE RUMPUS: Vera WangBattles Her SoHo Landlord

Inside the SoHo boutique Vera Wang may lose over a dispute with her landlord.

Retail real estate is renting at such high levels right now that it doesn't really matter if a landlord has a prestigious and desirable renter. Tenants who aren't paying optimum prices for leases in pricey neighborhoods are almost guaranteed to be pushed out including tony designers like Vera Wang, who has just sued the landlords of her Mercer Street boutique in SoHo (pictured left). Premier Equities purchased the retail condo of 158 Mercer Street earlier this year and promptly billed her for $272,000 in back taxes on her $45,920 monthly rent since her store opened in 2007. Wang contends that the previous owner covered the taxes, and the new owners simply want to oust her because she is paying around $220 per square foot while the average asking rate is now nearly $1,000 for a location like hers. While Wang's lease is up in 2016, she has the option to renew for five more years, which would make it a long wait for the owners to optimize their revenues from the building's retail space. How the case will shake out remains unclear, but it shows that landlords, particularly ones that have just taken over a property with existing clients, are becoming increasingly ruthless, even with presumably enviable clients.

Bridezilla: Vera Wang sues landlord to keep Soho lease (The Real Deal)

TRANSITIONS: Jean-Michel Cazabat's Bleecker Street Boutique Turns To ASH + More Turnover Nearby

If large parts of Manhattan are suffering from too much available retail real estate, than there are still a few other streets where stores do not sit empty for too long. Bleecker Street between Christopher and Bank Streets in the West Village has been one of them, but even there, a few stores are out of commission or undergoing transition. The theory on this street has recently been that any time a retail space becomes available, Marc Jacobs will swoop in and take it over, but even he may have maxed out on the West Village as his company turns its eye to larger stores in other Manhattan neighborhoods. There are some spaces coming up that Marc may not be as quick to absorb. For starters, the glamorous Jean-Michel Cazabat shoe boutique is now an ASH shoes sale pop-up store.
Is Cazabat out of business?
No.
You can still buy his shoes at Barneys and other stores, but you may notice that his prices have jumped. The designer has moved his production back to Italy from China, which also pushed him back into the luxury category, precipitating a split from his backers who also own the Ash brand and have smoothly moved it into the Bleecker Street space —for the moment, at least.

Corporate changes have had an effect on several other Bleecker Street stores as well. Kurt Geiger's management has bought the company out from parent Jones Group which is currently being dismantled piece by piece, so that shoe store has remained in place. Juicy Couture, however, has been sold and and has exited its sizable store (pictured below) which remains under the control of former parent Kate Spade & Co. (formerly Fifth & Pacific, formerly Liz Claiborne & Co.). Will Kate move in? It seems like too good of a space to pass up, but for now, the sign in the window says the empty store is available. A few blocks away, brother shop Jack Spade is covered in green painted plywood, but its website lists it as temporarily under renovation, so we expect it to return soon enough.

Sadly, one well liked store seems to be gone from Bleecker for good. Freeman's Sporting Club appears to have exited its store at no. 343. Though it is still listed on the website, the shop is empty and available. FSC had a challenging time in the West Village. It's first location on the corner of Bleecker and Christopher streets had to be moved with little notice shortly after opening when the building was declared structurally unsafe —always a bummer. Happily, the store was able to swiftly move half a block to 343 where a temporary store eventually became a permanent outpost. That space, however, is now empty and available. East of Christopher Street, there are more vacancies including the former J.A.C.H.S. boutique*. J.Press York Street sells a label which is reportedly being discontinued by the uber-traditional menswear retailer. Will J.Press fill it with a selection from its classic assortments this Fall? As its flagship is still under an extended renovation, it would give its loyal New York customers a local place to shop the brand albeit in an inconvenient location, though it's more likely that the space will be marketed to other retailers. How long some of these spaces take to be filled will say a lot about Bleecker Street's status to retailers in the coming months. If the are leased quickly, then the stretch remains near the top of Manhattan's most desirable shopping locations, but if we start to see the kind of vacancies that are plaguing the Upper East Side and the nearby Meatpacking District, then Bleecker's heyday may be coming to an end. Have a look as some of these storefronts in the gallery below.
*Correction: The J.A.C.H.S. Store is not in fact closed and is open for business. We mistook it for different empty store on the same block.

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Previously:
New York Paradox: The Post Addresses New York's Empty Store Problem

NEW YORK PARADOX: The Post Addresses New York's Empty Store Problem

Last month, The Shophound was struck by how many retail spaces in the ostensibly hot Meatpacking District were empty, and had been so for months on end with little to suggest that things would change anytime soon (pictured above). Over the weekend, Steve Cuozzo at The New York Post points out that this has become a citywide problem, pointing to the intersection of Third Avenue and 61st Street where, one block north of busy Bloomingdale's, three out of the four corners are hosting long-term vacancies. He notes that nobody has actually quantified all of the available space in a New York and what it is being asked for it. We really don't have the statistics to tell us how bad this problem is, but our eyes can tell us that something is amiss, or worse. "It’s a shame," he writes, "because window-shopping is more fun when there’s something in the window prettier than a broker’s name and a promise that the dark hole is “prime.”

While real estate brokers are hard-selling major newly developed and redeveloped properties downtown in the Financial District and at Hudson Yards in the far West 30s as new luxury shopping destinations, there appears, to the casual observer, to be no shortage of empty storefronts not just in the Meatpacking District and on the wealthy Upper East Side, but also in Chelsea and on the Upper West Side, and Murray Hill, and pretty much everywhere else in the city that isn't Hudson Yards or 3 and 4 World Trade Center or Brookfield Place or the soon to be gleaming new South Street Seaport Pier 17. Why, if there is such an abundance of retail opportunity in Manhattan, are so many affluent neighborhoods looking nearly blighted with empty stores, many of which until recently held long term and often beloved local businesses pushed out by onerous lease renewal terms?

Cuozzo offers more than a few explanations. Greedy landlords are simply overestimating the value of their retail spaces or are forced to overvalue them in order to secure construction loans. Many buildings are now under foreign ownership by landlords who have no idea how the New York real estate market works and have been known to routinely disrupt lease negotiations with new unrealistic demands and conditions that destroy nearly completed deals. The development boom has created more space that New York's merchants actually need. The 10 to 25 year-old leases coming up for renewal were in many cases signed when the city's retail spaces were undervalued and so most renewals will reasonably include some kind of substantial increase for which tenants are often unprepared. Landlords are increasingly willing to throw over the independent storeowner for a "credit" tenant like a bank or a national chain whose ability to meet costs are less dependent on business in a single location. The building owners are content to leave spaces empty for extended periods until they finally get these tenants, many of which create shopping stretches composed of banks alternating with drugstores and little else. These are just a sampling of the factors that have caused a disturbing disconnect in the cost of retail space and the number of vacant stores waiting to be filled.

If these empty retail spaces were dresses hanging unsold on a rack, they would get marked down until they attracted customers. Sadly, real estate does not seem to operate under the same principle. Cuozzo offers a few solutions, including some common sense remedies like more reasonable appraisals of what some landlords should be demanding in rent, and easing some of the arcane regulations facing new storeowners and particularly restaurateurs. he also points to the Upper West Side's new regulations regarding the size of new storefronts in certain areas. Meant to discourage large big box stores from shutting out smaller players by commandeering whole blocks, the rules may have had a chilling effect on leasing any space at all. The most important step, however is for the city's real estate forces (and government) to recognize that there is a problem at all. They seem so busy promoting shiny new projects, that they don't seem to notice that scores of empty stores are damaging neighborhoods and mitigating the appeal of the expensive apartments under which they sit. "Is it in anyone’s interest to have so many empty windows?" Cuozzo asks, "We’re becoming a city everyone wants to live in — with no places to shop."

Why a booming Manhattan is full of empty storefronts by Steve Cuozzo (NYPost)
Previously:
Space Available: There Are A Lot Of Empty Stores On 14th Street In The Meatpacking District