Former West Village Restaurant Properties Being Converted to Retail Stores
Once a pie shop and café
Routinely, monthly roundups of restaurant openings and closings show twice as many openings as closings, as we mentioned in our recent pessimistic assessment of the challenges facing restaurateurs today. We're apparently in a huge hospitality bubble, wherein any place that debuts with enough hype seems to attract crowds and make money. But how long can this boom continue?
Perhaps the signs foretelling the end are already here. In the West Village, for example -- one of the era's most popular locations for fine dining -- storefronts that were once restaurants are being turned to non-restaurant uses. Concurrently, the inventory of vacant restaurants has grown. Here are some examples in both categories.
At 330 Bleecker Street, at the busy corner of Christopher and Bleecker, a valuable storefront that was once a bakery and coffee shop, is now being converted to a store selling designer English colognes and candles. We wrote about the café's closing.
A store next to Five Guys near the corner of Barrow and Seventh Avenue South is transforming from an organic pizzeria to a seller of high-end belts -- and we don't mean expensive cocktails.
At the corner of Perry and West 4th Street, a long-vacant storefront that was once a Sardinian restaurant will now be a designer clothing and handbag store.
At Bank and Bleecker, long-running Thai restaurant Toons -- just about the last Siamese remaining in the West Village -- is being replaced by French clothier Maje.
An off-price (and quite decent) spaghetti restaurant at the corner of Perry and Greenwich Avenue that closed about a year ago is now a trendy men's barbershop.
Next: A few of the currently troubled restaurant storefronts ...
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