Time Warner Building, 2 years later and the state of local retail

Not my view - image by jamesedmunds

I spent some time today at the Time Warner building. Mostly, I was curious about how the building was doing and wanted to try out the Thomas Keller Bouchon Bakery, and used the opportunity to catch up with a friend. We ordered from the takeaway section and sat at a dining bar that was seated away from the foot traffic and overlooked the atrium, but not the part with a view of Central Park (or of the giant Samsung sign). I had a view of Emporio Armani instead.

How do these businesses succeed when it was so tiresome to be inside the building? Usually my friend and I spend hours catching up; today, we finished our coffee and called it a date. We could have been sitting in any upscale mall in America, and it didn't seem to match the quality of the pastry being served. I wondered last year about the experience of a vertical mall in New York City when the street is infinitely more interesting, and I still contend that it is a shame that the Time Warner Building didn't work harder to get a local entrepreneur into the building. I tried shopping, even bought a housewarming gift at Borders, but I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally worked my way outside where it was immediately more fun to speculate about who were the people sitting on the stool-high metal bollards at the curb.

Fresh from my urban mall experience, I attended a panel at the Municipal Art Society tonight on local retail and how it was holding up against big boxes making their moves into New York. The audience primarily sympathized with local businessowners though the panel was a good mix of commercial developers and brokers as well as independent "alternative" developers lika Irwin Cohen, the developer of Chelsea Market.

Whoever they were working for, everyone agreed that local retail was vital to the success of a development, on all fronts. It's important to developers who want to command high residential rents, since it seems that people will pay to be in a specific neighborhood, and that property values disappear when the eclectic local retail "shifts." Diverse retail is important for existing communities, and for workforce development.

So why isn't preservation or encouragement of local retail more prevalent? One thing that everyone mentioned is the "4-corner bank" syndrome. Typically, no single property owner will sacrifice the rent for a corporate giant just to maintain the ambience of a neighborhood, especially if its competition at the other three corners is reaping the benefits of NOT doing so. Interestingly, most people in the audience seemed to live in or at least be aware of the Upper East Side, where the Duane Reade and bank syndrome is in full force.

A couple panelists advocated letting the private sector come up with creative solutions to fit the urban context, and came out against regulation. A couple of other developers said that it takes a commitment of risk on the developers part, and a partnership with the entrepreneur to come up with a plan that will fit the business and the building. Only two people, Irwin Cohen and Victor Dadras, who works for NYC's Department of Small Business Services on something called the Storefront Improvement Program (here's an example), thought that the city could encourage better private sector coordination to maintain a local retail and neighborhood flavor.

I left before the bitter end of the Q&A, so I remain puzzled: what is going on with the development community and the Planning Department that major mixed-use developments like Atlantic Yards, Flatbush Nostrand Junction, East River Plaza, and Bronx Terminal Market continue to prefer non-New York-based chains when everyone seems to like local? It seems that private and public sectors want local to stay - so is the City's rich retail fabric being unravelled by free market weavers?


Samsung sign with Christos Gates in background, image by la madrugada