The Gap is closing its three-level store at 680 Fifth Ave. — the latest holiday-season lump of coal for the city’s troubled retail real estate scene.
The shutdown, planned for Jan. 1, comes as a shock.
Although the company said earlier this year it would close hundreds of “underperforming” stores across the US, it made no mention of 680 Fifth.
How can a store on the avenue between East 53rd and East 54th streets, one of the busiest blocks in the world, be “underperforming”?
The soon-to-be-dark Gap venue joins two other large, empty venues on the avenue’s prime blocks below 57th Street. The former Ralph Lauren Polo store has been vacant for more than a year, and Henri Bendel is locking its doors in January.
No one involved could be reached over the Christmas holiday, but Douglas Elliman retail chairman Faith Hope Consolo, who died Sunday at 73, would understand.
As if the “queen of retail’s” untimely passing wasn’t sad enough, the timing of her death lent a dark poignancy to the debate over the city’s troubled retail scene.
She was under no illusions about the state of the market, unlike some brokers who sugarcoated the situation.
Consolo controversially cited a “20 percent vacancy rate” to the New York Times in September. The number was widely picked up in the media. She later claimed she was misquoted — 20 percent referred to availability, not vacancy, she said, and even that was based on an unofficial survey, not a formal report.
Landlord-haters took the “20 percent” figure at face value and used it to justify pushing through a retail rent control bill in the city council that would likely make retail vacancy worse.
That set off a counterattack against the bill on the grounds that, as New York magazine argued in a headline, “There is no crisis of retail vacancy in Manhattan.”
Various factions blamed the plague of empty storefronts on high rents, the growth in online shopping (the obvious main cause of brick-and-mortar failure all over the US) and a huge increase in the volume of New York City’s retail space over the past 12 years.
But whether there’s a “crisis,” the situation is by any definition a bloody mess. Consolo’s 20 percent estimate might have been slightly exaggerated, but it was closer to the truth than absurd claims of 6 percent vacancy by various “analysts” and some business improvement districts.
Despite claims by some brokers and retail/fashion trade publications to the contrary, “experiential” retail and an explosion of cheap food and fitness locations won’t come close to making up for the Homeric-scale retreat of retailers from brick and mortar.
Consolo, my friend of 25 years, was long a happy cheerleader for the Big Apple’s retail real estate market. Through boom and bust, Faith proclaimed that stores the world over were clamoring to open in New York.
Her fun way with a phrase made her the most quoted retail broker in town, even though she sometimes exaggerated her accomplishments and disparaged competitors’ deals in off-the-record comments (she laughed off a certain men’s boutique at a Plaza District location as a “made-up Italian”).
But although she put the best face on every minor new lease — “Rice is the new ramen,” she said of a deal for a tiny spot in Harlem — she knew that things were worse than anyone’s seen and landlords were getting desperate.
“We are seeing a lot of deals and offers because the landlords have come down to meet the market,” Consolo recently told my colleague Lois Weiss. Note that “offers” aren’t the same thing as “deals.”
I don’t know whether she knew about the Gap closing. But she wouldn’t have been surprised.