The once-teeming shopping complex at Rockefeller Center has become a ghost town with dozens of stores sitting empty as the crucial Christmas season approaches.
More than a third of the 140 stores that were in the gleaming landmark complex last year have been shuttered or are about to leave–the biggest number of closed doors in decades.
On Fifth Avenue, such tony retailers as the Knot Shop, the Golden Showcase and Arthur Sogno Jewelers closed months ago and have yet to be replaced.
Along the famed Channel Garden it’s the same story–pricey stores are gone and boarded-up spaces have been left in their wake.
Months after most of the mom-and-pop shops in the busy underground concourse were forced out by management in a sweeping redevelopment plan, most still are vacant, leaving only a barbershop and travel agency.
At a time when Madison Avenue and many other plush shopping strips are bustling with business, thanks to the teeming economy, Rockefeller Center’s retail scene is virtually dead.
“To walk down Fifth Avenue and see all those stores with painted-over windows is amazing,” said Faith Hope Consolo, a leading retail broker. “I’ve never seen so many vacancies there.”
The empty stores are the result of a risky strategy by the new owners of Rockefeller Center–which include developer Tishman Speyer and Goldman Sachs–to turn the complex into a retail and entertainment mecca comparable with 57th Street or Madison Avenue.
Emptying out the complex has been necessary, they say, to make way for the dazzling new retail plan they’ve been promising since they bought the complex two years ago in a $1.2 billion deal.
But that plan has been stalled as the developers have juggled competing visions for the complex and have failed to attract glitzy blue-chip retailers.
As tens of thousands of shoppers prepare to make the annual pilgrimage to Rockefeller Center’s famous Christmas tree, the stakes of this gamble are clearly growing.
With so many stores vacant, fewer visitors than ever will be spending their dollars at the complex.
Now, many storeowners who remain said they are being hurt by the absence of their prominent neighbors.
One employe of the GNC nutrition store estimated that sales were about $1,300 a week, down from $2,000 since her neighbors moved out.
Surrounded by empty stores, Jerolim Vukic, the owner of Jerry’s Men’s Hair Styling Salon, said his business was off by 30 percent.
“It hurts,” he said. “People don’t have any reason to walk down here anymore.”
Making matters worse, the high vacancy comes at a time when New York is enjoying one of its biggest shopping booms in years. Dozens of new stores that have opened within a few blocks of Rockefeller Center are expecting to do record sales this Christmas season.
The new owners said they are not worried about missing out on all this business because they’re working on a long-term strategy.
“We’re right on track with where we want to be with leasing and retail,” said Steven Rubenstein, a spokesman for Jerry Speyer, who has been leading the leasing effort.
But as months and months pass without a lease signing, cracks in Speyer’s master plan have begun to appear.
Speyer has said privately that the cornerstone of his plan would be to bring in a world-famous entertainment company such as Walt Disney to produce extravaganzas in Radio City Music Hall. He envisioned shows attracting thousands of additional tourists and shoppers to the complex.
But Disney, MCA and numerous other big-name entertainment companies have passed on taking on the huge chore of managing and filling the Music Hall, leaving Speyer to renegotiate a lease with the hall’s current tenant, Radio City Productions.
An even more ominous sign of Speyer’s problems came this summer when Tishman Speyer was forced to reject a first draft of the plan by its architecture firm, Beyer Blinder Belle.
Retail brokers who saw it said that it called for numerous new grand entrances into the complex’ concourse level, including an escalator in the middle of the famous Channel Garden.
Such a scheme would be too expensive and would require too many controversial changes in the landmark.
“It was a little over the top,” said Michael Hirschfeld, head of the Hirschfeld Group.
It was so over the top that it rankled Speyer’s main partner in the deal, Goldman Sachs, the white-shoe investment bank that put up most of the money to buy the complex, sources said.
