Retail Chains Abandon Manhattan: 'It's Unsustainable' (no office workers, no tourists)
For years, Bryant Park Grill & Cafe in Midtown Manhattan has been one of the country’s top-grossing restaurants, the star property in Ark Restaurants’ portfolio of 20 restaurants across the United States.
But what propelled it to the top has vanished.
The tourists are gone, the office towers surrounding it are largely empty and the restaurant’s 1,000-seat dining room is closed. Instead, dinner is cooked and served on its patio, and the scaled-down restaurant brings in about $12,000 a day — an 85 percent plunge in revenue, its chief executive said.
Five months into the pandemic, the drastic turn of events at businesses like Bryant Park Grill & Cafe that are part of national chains shows how the economic damage in New York has in many cases been far worse than elsewhere in the country.
In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including J.C. Penney, Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good. Many other large brands, like Victoria’s Secret and the Gap, have their kept high-profile locations closed in Manhattan, while reopening in other states.
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Even as the city has contained the virus and slowly reopens, there are ominous signs that some national brands are starting to abandon New York. The city is home to many flagship stores, chains and high-profile restaurants that tolerated astronomical rents and other costs because of New York’s global cachet and the reliable onslaught of tourists and commuters.
A Uniqlo store on Fifth Avenue. Many businesses in Manhattan are struggling because of a lack of tourists and a relatively small number of office workers. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
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For four months, the Victoria’s Secret flagship store at Herald Square in Manhattan has been closed and not paying its $937,000 monthly rent. “It will be years before retail has even a chance of returning to New York City in its pre-Covid form,” the retailer’s parent company recently told its landlord in a legal document.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/nyregion/nyc-economy-chain-stores.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
= new reply since forum marked as read
We had family down there and went often to visit.
I remember walking through Riverwalk (big mall by the river) and thinking to myself how most of the stores were just general vanilla that you see in every mall in the country. Other areas of NOLA had a much more diverse, quirky representation. Thought it was sad.
Like you, I have now noticed the same thing going on abroad. I was in Budapest, traveling with a friend, when she had to go Starbucks for a coffee! Here we were in the premier city for coffee culture and she had to go to freaking Starbucks. Pathetic.
I guess it’s the future. Just not a very interesting one. 
there were very few national chain restaurants in NYC proper. When the Olive Garden 
opened in Times Square, I longed for some event that would make the chain dreck purveyors go away. So maybe not so bad re the chain restaurants.
That restaurant review was epic!
