Chambers gets retail revival

99-cent stores pushed out by condo boom's upgrades

A spate of high-end residential development along Chambers Street is transforming perhaps the only truly commercial street in Tribeca from a scrappy strip into what may eventually be an elegant retail thoroughfare.

Chambers, which runs about eight blocks between the Hudson River and City Hall, has long been lined by 99-cent stores, Chinese takeout storefronts and other restaurants.

Construction of about 1,000 residential units is under development, a boomlet some brokers believe will give the area’s revival a boost. As plans for new tenants and buildings move forward at the site of the World Trade Center five blocks to the south, momentum is building.

“Chambers is like a train on the fast track now,” Faith Hope Consolo, head of Prudential Douglas Elliman’s retail leasing and sales division, said. “The only thing you ever had there before was, like, Hamburger Harry’s and the Cheese of All Nations, but now you have good restaurants looking in the area.

“By the end of the year, we’re going to see a completely different street,” she said.

The transformation has already begun, with the addition of new restaurants like Kitchenette at 156 Chambers and the Soda Shop at 125 Chambers, along with a Starbucks, joining old standouts such as Acappella at 1 Hudson Street at Chambers, which appeared in the first episode of the recently-ended television series “The Sopranos.” Nearby, an upscale wine shop is now serving patrons, and soon a gourmet bagel shop will open its doors.

“One by one, stores are being replaced,” said Herbert Chou, a sales associate who handles retail leasing and sales at Warburg Realty. “It’s happening really quite rapidly at this point.”

However, some brokers have reservations about the street, saying it might take quite a while for it to distinguish itself from other run-of-the-mill commercial strips in Manhattan.

“I’ll put it to you this way: I’ve never had a client say, ‘I want to be on Chambers Street,'” said Alan Napack, a senior director at the commercial brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, who lives in Battery Park City and frequently visits his dentist on Chambers, a street he says has areas that are “a little schlocky.” “It is what it is,” Napack added. “I don’t think it’s ever going to be like 34th Street.”

But Consolo said she believes that Chambers Street has the raw material to become a thriving commercial artery, though it is as yet unrealized. A two-way street with shops lining both sides, it receives heavy foot traffic thanks to two subway stations, the A/C at Church Street and the 1/2/3 at West Broadway. Many pedestrians are students traveling to the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Stuyvesant High School or one of the other schools in the area, or are residents of nearby Battery Park City. Government workers from nearby City Hall and shoppers also traverse the neighborhood. “There are a lot of feet on the street, but as yet there is not a strong retail landscape, because you’ve had a street that’s been known for discount stores and nondescript tenancies,” Consolo said. “The fact that you have residential developers very interested in bringing the neighborhood forward is important. They know what needs to be done.”

Now, with new residential development, the border of chichi Tribeca is creeping down from Reade Street, one block north of Chambers, to Warren Street, one block south. Much of that new development is adding retail space at the base.

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“It’s such a residential explosion there that it’s turning the area, and Chambers Street especially, into a seven-day-a-week market,” Chou said. “A couple years ago, it was just five days a week, only workers and students.”

With Manhattan’s largest Whole Foods Market going in at 101 Warren Street, a mixed-use development being built just a block off of Chambers, and a Barnes & Noble bookstore and a Bed Bath & Beyond, the street could become a main thoroughfare for new residents, brokers said. Another residential development, 200 Chambers Street, at West Street, has about 15,000 square feet of retail space for lease.

The national retailers at 101 Warren “are going to be a big draw for the Tribeca neighborhood, which has been under-stored for a long time,” said Robin Abrams, executive vice president at the Lansco Corp. While the area has small pockets of retail, such as upscale home furnishing stores, spas and restaurants, “the population, for the most part, has always had to go to Broadway, which has a hodgepodge of tenancy,” she said. “What’s happening at Greenwich and Chambers is very exciting and could link Broadway and Greenwich via Chambers Street.”

Abrams said she recently represented a national retailer with strong interest in leasing the 6,000-square-foot space at 200 Chambers. The deal, which got to the point where the negotiated leasing rate was $100 to $125 a foot, fell through, but only because the retailer couldn’t make the space work for them, Abrams said.

The asking rents at 200 Chambers are currently $200 a foot, she said, which may be difficult to achieve.

While landlords may not achieve those kinds of rents yet on Chambers Street, rents have risen greatly from the $40 to $60 a foot charged only a couple of years ago, Chou said. Brokers put current rents, depending on the size and quality of the space, at about $100 a square foot, though Consolo said she expected those rents to rise by 10 to 15 percent by the end of 2007.

Chou agreed: “Right now it’s a good deal, but Chambers is going to be relatively expensive in the next six months to a year,” he said.

Consolo said she has been talking with several established restaurateurs — from Soho, the Meatpacking District and the Upper East Side — about opening on the street.

Matt Pomerantz, co-founder and co-owner of Murray’s Bagels, which has shops in Chelsea and Greenwich Village, agreed that Chambers Street is on the radar of restaurateurs. He will be opening the first Original Zucker’s Bagels & Smoked Fish, an upscale shop selling hand-rolled bagels and gourmet smoked fish, in the next two months.

Pomerantz, who lives in the neighborhood, said he is paying “well north of $100 a foot” to lease his 1,400-square-foot street-level shop, plus the large basement area, of a condominium conversion at 146 Chambers Street. The space is being designed by Glen Coben, an architect formerly with the Rockwell Group who has designed such notable spaces as the restaurant Sascha and celebrity chef Mario Batali’s Del Posto.

“We’re looking to make an impression Downtown with a bagel shop because we’re confident about what’s going on,” Pomerantz said. “Glen Coben has designed a 22,000-square-foot restaurant for Mario Batali, and for him to be interested in designing a bagel shop, I think that says something about the area.”

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