Top 10 Retail Leases of the Month: September
Beer halls, gyms, restaurants and a big movie theater all signed leases last month
By The Editors October 16, 2017 9:25 am
reprints
Earlier this year there were a number of prominent openings of movie theaters in Manhattan, and it looks as if Queens has finally gotten in on the action: The South Korean cinema chain—CJ CGV—announced that it’s opening a seven-auditorium 4D multiplex at the 1.2-million-square-foot mixed-use development Tangram in Flushing. (The 34,000-square-foot movie theater will be the first in the neighborhood in 30 years!)
But movie theaters are nothing in comparison to fast food, which seems to be making an unheard of push into New York (see our video on Taco Bell here). Shake Shack continued to vie for supremacy, with a 27,000-square-foot lease for a new headquarters and flagship in the West Village at 225 Varick Street.
Hot on the heels of the opening of its Brooklyn digs, the Japanese clothing and home goods chain, Muji, picked up a 13,000-square-foot lease at 127 East 59th Street (its eighth location in the five boroughs).
Beer lovers had much to toast: a new beer hall—Knickerbocker Social—took over an entire 12,776-square-foot building at 240 West 52nd Street in the Theater District, as the broker of the deal, Victor Menkin, told Commercial Observer. And Mikkeller NYC, a microbrewery with an outpost in Citi Field, also signed a 7,500-square-foot lease at 51-40 58th Place in nearby Woodside, Queens. And while, yes, we recognize the differences between cider and beer, Wilklow Orchards—an orchard in upstate New York—signed an 1,100-square-foot deal for a Bad Seed Cider Company at 585 Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights.
A little farther uptown from Knickerbocker, there was two pieces of interesting restaurant news at Time Warner Center. First, Bluebird, a West London restaurant, was opening its first New York City outpost in the 10,000-square-foot space vacated by the Italian restaurant A Voce. Separately, David Chang’s Momofuku signed a lease for a 4,000-square-foot noodle bar on the complex’s third floor. Downtown, a Canadian hospitality group took 10,000 square feet at the space vacated by Florian at 233 Park Avenue South, but as yet we have no word who will move in.
All that food and beer will no doubt induce the disciplined among us to head to the gym afterwards, and, fortunately, there were two pieces of fitness news: ClassPass just opened a 7,000-square-foot fitness studio in Industry City, at 80 39th Street, and the cycling company Peloton opened its first standalone showroom (and second store) on the Upper East Side at 1156 Madison Avenue, taking 3,165 square feet.
