Wine bars really began to supplant winos on the Bowery in 2007, when Whole Foods, the Bowery Hotel and the New Museum of Contemporary Art all opened on New York’s fabled broken boulevard. The 2008 market crash did little to slow skid row’s transformation into the Meatpacking District East (see: The Standard, East Village Hotel at 25 Cooper Square, just off Bowery).
Now the Downtown thoroughfare is poised to enter yet another phase of redevelopment. Intermix, the self-proclaimed “fashion boutique for trendsetters, A-Listers and glam fashionistas” opened in May at 332 Bowery, a former bodega. And last month, a portfolio of 11 mixed-use buildings sold to hip-hop clothier Joseph Betesh for $62 million.
The retail brokerage RKF is at the front of this gold rush. And Senior Director Brian Segall has become the firm’s Bowery guru. Last week, Mr. Segall and Robert Futterman, RKF chairman and chief executive, led The Commercial Observer on a tour of the company’s Bowery assignments, which (to the dismay of preservationists including Martin Scorsese) bolster RKF Executive Vice President Ariel Schuster’s prediction that the Bowery will soon be “one golden strip.”
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