Pop-up on steroids
Bowery lands glamorous temp fashion store
FABLED,
once-mysterious 190 Bowery will soon have a retail tenant that might be its first in 119 years: fashion emporium Totokaelo, which just signed a lease for 8,918 square feet at the landmarked property owned by Aby Rosen’s RFR.
But it might not be for long. The emporium is actually a jumbo pop-up to run from early fall through March 2018.
RFR Retail Executive Vice President Jordan S. Claffey said, “I’m optimistic that this short-term agreement will turn into a long-term one.” Totokaelo also has a store nearby at 54 Crosby St.
Totokaelo, a subsidiary of Vancouver-based Herschel Capital Corp., was founded in Seattle in 2008. It sells designer lines including Acne Studios, Comme des Garçons, Jil Sander and Proenza Schouler.
Six-story, 38,000-squarefoot 190 Bowery at Spring Street is the stuff of Big Apple legend. Opened in 1898 as the Germania Bank, it was abandoned at some point and fell into decay until famed fine art photographer
Jay Maisel bought it in 1966 for $102,000.
Maisel and his family lived and worked unseen in its 72 rooms until they sold it to Rosen for an eye-popping $55 million in 2014. During the Maisels’ time there, the neo-Renaissance property was so ghostly and graffiti-covered that most passersby, and even brokers, assumed it was vacant. Artlover Rosen transformed it into a boutique office-retail address, but kept some of the graffiti on lower floors as a memento of the neighborhood’s rugged past.
Rosen leased all the office space to Great Bowery, an umbrella group of creative agencies and services. But he’d also love to permanently fill the store space that’s fronted by tall, arched windows on two sides.
Claffey said the asking rent for the retail space on the ground floor, mezzanine and basement was $2 million a year. Cushman & Wakefield’s Brandon Singer and
Michael Cody also repped RFR, while Maxwelle NY’s
Michael Yadgard repped Totokaelo.
Only the most well-heeled developers and tenants can foot the bill to have Danish starchitect Bjarke Ingels design a building for them. But there’s a more affordable option to get a taste of Ingels.
When his firm, BIG, moves from downtown Manhattan to larger digs in Brooklyn next year, it will leave behind 22,327 square feet on the 33rd floor of RXR’s 61 Broadway.
We don’t ordinarily mention small sublease offerings. But this one comes with some special amenities: built-in furnishings Ingels designed himself, including bookshelves, tables and chairs. The space also boasts open views of the harbor and the World Trade Center.
Sadly, we can’t quantify y “affordable,” because the CBRE team handling it — Mary Ann Tighe, Tim Dempsey, Chris Mansfield and Ken Rapp — wouldn’t cite a price. The team also repped BIG in its move to Dumbo’s 45 Main St.
If $3.25 million sounds like a lot of rent for a 5,200square-foot store — even on hot West 42nd Street across from One Bryant Park and down the block from the Knickerbocker Hotel — know that it comes with a unique amenity: an entire, graffiti-strewn, 1961-vintage New York City subway car.
Not that tenants now looking at the vacant former Asics athletics and footwear space are clamoring to keep it.
“I think most tenants would have it taken out,” chuckled JLL Vice Chairman Patrick A. Smith, part of a JLL team that has the nod to market the space. It fell suddenly empty in October 2015, barely a year after it opened, due to a dispute between the Japanese retailer and its North American retail licensee.
Smith said, “Because the space was tied up in bankruptcy, the building ownership — Ivanhoé Cambridge and Callahan Capital Properties — didn’t get it back until recently.”
After subway car No. 8394 was retired in 1983, it popped up in movies including “Die Hard with a Venggeance.” It later somehow ended up in the Mojave Desert before it was restored for Asics.
Since the store closed, it’s sat in eerie isolation behind the sidewalk windows — a ghost of a ghost. How will they get it out of there?
“It’s a modular storefront, so it can easily be taken out,” Smith explained.
But, he laughed, “If my living room were a little bigger, I’d take it for myself.”