High-end retail spills into new stretch of Madison Avenue

From left: Faith Hope Consolo, 1142 Madison Avenue and 1088 Madison Avenue
From left: Faith Hope Consolo, 1142 Madison Avenue and 1088 Madison Avenue

Two high-end retail expanses on Madison Avenue — in Carnegie Hill and from East 59th to East 79th streets — are slowly encroaching on a relatively sleepy stretch of the boulevard, long the stomping grounds of delis and dry cleaners.

New retail tenants in the East 80s, such as a Teavana concept store at 1142 Madison Avenue and Monnalisa, a children’s clothing store at 1088 Madison Avenue, are sparking questions about whether neighborhood old-timers can hang on.

“They’ll stay,” Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of Douglas Elliman’s Retail Group, told the Wall Street Journal. “They are staples. Somehow they manage to stay on.”

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And yet Consolo pointed to Mephisto, a newly-arrived French shoe company that took up an old antique shop at the corner of East 82nd Street and Madison, drawn by rent that is roughly $600 per foot, compared to more than $2,000 per square foot 20 blocks south.

Eventually, she predicted, upscale shopping will run in one unified swath from the 80s to well past 96th Street. The high-end wave, she explained, is following the flow of new restaurants that are increasingly opening north of 96th Street.

“Fashion follows food,” she told the Journal. [WSJ]Julie Strickland