The demise of Roosevelt Island's homogeneous red Main Street retail storefront signage began today starting with removal
and upside down trashing
of the Public Safety Department sign at 550 Main Street.
Main Street Master Leaseholder Hudson Related's David Kramer explained the new signage policy during April 2 Roosevelt Island Operating Corp (RIOC) Real Estate Advisory Committee meeting. According to Mr. Kramer:
... Every retailer can do whatever they want, that we are providing a certain platform which is to have a flat sign across that is lit and whatever they want to do within the rectangle they can do...
... we have some suggested colors...
Here's a final remembrance to Roosevelt Island's Main Street signage from 2009 post:
Main Street Image Of Roosevelt Island Is The Village From Glark
Roosevelt Island's drab, dreary and depressing Main Street has often been compared to East Berlin prior to the fall of the Wall or even The Village from the great British Television program The Prisoner. Glark, a blogger recently visiting Roosevelt Island wrote:
This morning I got up early and explored the half of Roosevelt Island I missed on my first trip to this weirdo bit on earth in the East River. Main Street in so late 60s and early 70s it made my teeth ache. It’s all concrete and metal siding, rundown and aesthetically homogeneous. It’s like a English village via Soviet Russia. It’s the New York version of The Village from the cult TV series The Prisoner. It’s fascinating that it is so close to Manhattan and yet worlds apart....
Main Street Image Of Roosevelt Island Is The Village From Glark
Roosevelt Island's drab, dreary and depressing Main Street has often been compared to East Berlin prior to the fall of the Wall or even The Village from the great British Television program The Prisoner. Glark, a blogger recently visiting Roosevelt Island wrote:
This morning I got up early and explored the half of Roosevelt Island I missed on my first trip to this weirdo bit on earth in the East River. Main Street in so late 60s and early 70s it made my teeth ache. It’s all concrete and metal siding, rundown and aesthetically homogeneous. It’s like a English village via Soviet Russia. It’s the New York version of The Village from the cult TV series The Prisoner. It’s fascinating that it is so close to Manhattan and yet worlds apart.
It is quite detailed and 54 pages long. Issues of Roosevelt Island demographics, appropriate retail store and square footage mix, what type of retail services do the residents of Roosevelt Island want and not want, competitive analysis of existing retail choices, problems caused by the restrictive covenant in Gristedes Supermarket lease that inhibits retail competition, how can visitors be attracted to Roosevelt Island to spend retail dollars, future options for Main Street retail, among many others are addressed. It is a comprehensive document. The Study's findings are (Page 2):
Roosevelt Island residents do just 12% of their shopping on the island.
The existing retail mix on Main Street is failing to capture the new market opportunities afforded by the island’s growing affluent market.
Main Street suffers from several design flaws.
Residents have a very negative attitude towards Main Street.
Roosevelt Island is gaining affluent residents while maintaining its economic and ethnic diversity.
Cultural and athletic activities bring thousands of visitors to Roosevelt Island each year, but this translates to very little spending on Main Street.
The most desired new retail uses from residents on Roosevelt Island are a bakery, a restaurant, a green grocer, an ice cream shop, a pizzeria and fish store.
There is sufficient demand to support at least a small-format green grocer, a bakery, another sit-down restaurant and a quick-service food and beverage establishment.
Roosevelt Island Main Street Arcades Page 14 of Report
The Study recommends (Page 3):
... six major interrelated intervention strategies to set a new life for Main Street in motion:
Create a public/private partnership to lease and/or help manage Main Street.
Pursue specific streetscape interventions and create appearance standards and design guidelines for Main Street retailers.
Revive the Roosevelt Island Chamber of Commerce to be the steward of Main Street success.
Re-organize existing non-profit uses to maximize available marketable space, and cluster
appropriate non-profits into space more suitable to function.
Make Good Shepherd Plaza the “town square” of Roosevelt Island.
Create a “Gateway to Main Street” at the southern entrance point to Main Street.
The Study concludes (Page 38) that the following types of retail tenants would be most appropriate for Roosevelt Island's Main Street:
1. Green Grocer
2. Ice Cream Shop
3. Specialty Cheese Shop
4. Seafood Store
5. Bakery
6. Pizzeria
7. Florist
8. Restaurant
9. Butcher
10. Home furnishings store.
As to the future, the Study found, as we all know from historical practice, that RIOC is not qualified to manage a successful Main Street Retail environment (Page 39-40):
... The RIOC does not have the administrative or professional capacity to create a successful retail environment on Main Street.
This is due in large part to the extensive RFP process which is required pursuant to the RIOC’s status as a public authority. The RIOC should follow the example provided by other public authorities in New York which have dealt with this same issue by engaging retail professionals in the private sector. Private involvement in Main Street could utilize one of the three following basic approaches:
1. The Master Leaseholder (the JFK Model): Under this arrangement, the RIOC would solicit proposals, as it did in 2005, for a private takeover of all or some Main Street retail storefronts. Terminal 4 at John F. Kennedy airport is an example of such an approach. In 1997, the Port Authority of New York executed a 25 year lease with Schipol USA and LCOR Incorporated for all retail spaces in the terminal. Schipol/LCOR sub-leases each space and manages the overall retail environment.
2. The Retail Manager/Consultant (the Grand Central Model): This model would allow the RIOC to maintain control over Main Street, but the leasing process and management of the tenants would be handled by a private consultant(s). The tenanting of individual spaces, storefront design guidelines and maintenance standards would be based on an overall retail master plan developed by the RIOC. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s partnership with Jones Lang LaSalle and William Jackson Ewing is a good example of this arrangement. This example is highlighted on the following page.
3. The Hybrid Model: This model, which represents a combination of the first two approaches, would be based on a Retail Master Plan created by the RIOC. The Retail Master Plan would identify specific categories of retail that make sense from both a market and community viewpoint and, where possible, identify the potential locations of each. RIOC would then solicit proposals for a master leaseholder. The master lease agreement would contain stipulations about specific types of tenants and locations are available based on the RIOC Retail Master Plan.
The RIOC has articulated a desire to continue to maintain some control over the tenanting and management of Main Street. As such, the Grand Central model really makes the most sense. The problem, however, would be the costs associated with retaining qualified private consultants. If retaining a consultant is not economically feasible, the RIOC should consider the feasibility of pursuing the Hybrid Model. This would allow the RIOC to identify several specific uses that are: (1) desired by residents; and (2) viable based on the market analysis in this report, and negotiate a master lease agreement with stipulations that the master leaseholder must pursue tenants in those categories. Conducting a transparent RFP process, including an independent appraisal of each space, for the overall management of Main Street would fulfill the requirements of the Public Authorities Act by securing a fair market value for the master lease. The private firm would then be allowed to sub-lease the spaces, as long as the tenants met the stipulations of the RIOC Retail Master Plan. ...
Maybe, perhaps, if we are extremely lucky, RIOC will follow through on the Study's recommendations, get out of the business of managing retail on Main Street and find a private sector Master Retail Leaseholder to take over Main Street.
Otherwise, Roosevelt Island's Main Street is doomed to continue to look like a drab relic of East Berlin before the Wall fell or the Village from The Prisoner!.
"It looks like East Berlin before the wall fell," said Andrew Oliver, executive vice president of Cushman & Wakefield Sonnenblick Goldman. For years, there was only one chain store, a Gristedes grocery, and much of the remaining retail was service-oriented: a diner, a Chinese takeout joint and a thrift shop, among others.
Main Street Thrift Store Beneath Eastwood/Roosevelt Landings
Much of the cause for the shoddy and worn out appearance of the existing retail stores as well as the depressingly long time vacant stores can be attributed to the ownership of the premises by RIOC, a state owned corporation, that has no expertise in leasing and managing retail stores.
Main Street Orphans International store space
A previous RIOC administration admitted in this 2/24/07 Main Street WIRE article:
RIOC has long privately acknowledged that it is not equipped to handle the leasing of the Main Street storefronts. "There’s no one on staff who is a retail management professional," said RIOC spokesman Bob Liff. "RIOC does not necessarily have the expertise in-house to run the retail [element], and that’s why they’ve gone out for an RFIP," or Request For Initial Proposals
In this earlier post, I reported being told that the RIOC Board of Directors are now prepared, subject to a final vote of the Real Estate Committee and full Board, to remedy this situation by removing RIOC from the burden of leasing and managing these stores with the issuance of a Request For Proposals seeking a private sector real estate developer to take over the retail stores as a Master Leaseholder. The Master Leaseholder will then sublease the individual stores to individual tenants.
RIOC President Steve Shane responded to this post by indicating that nothing has been decided yet regarding any Master Leaseholder. I inquired of Mr. Shane what could be the possible objection to a Master Leaseholder for the Main Street Retail stores and Mr. Shane replied:
The issue is one of service to the community. Rental income to a master leaseholder(now RIOC, but in the hands of a commercial real estate operator?) is not the overriding consideration. So, retaining control of use, both kind of service and income group serviced, with rent adjustments for necessary providers not otherwise able to afford competitive rents (see, for instance, difference between nail salon servicing market rent ladies and one servicing Section 8 ladies, a bread store or a fish market probably can't make it here) (see the last big dustup over chain stores vs. mom & Pop stores), etc, etc, wherein the quality of life as perceived by the Island residents (and of course as effectuated by dedicated RIOC with the advice and suggestion of RIRA)) is the highest priority, not the return to a commercial real estate operator.
The usual market place dynamics are not applicable here because When faced with the reality that there is less than 20,000 sf of vacant space, hard to imagine the master leasee who would want this problem for the sandwich profit it might make of $1-2/sf/year. No one can break the Gristede's lease or any of the other existing leases. I doubt the community would want RIVAA Gallery to be ousted from its space. Boy Scouts, batting cage, Thrift Store, etc.
We would have to go through the same PAAA routine of appraisal and FMV determination before RFP for master leasee, with all of those conditions or others as the community would ultimately surface. Assigning the existing leases only substitutes for the existing tenant's credit and credit is not the issue. It is not a simplistic problem.
...when you’re dealing with small merchants and the economics of collecting rent from them is miserable because they quite often can’t pay, to get them out of their space, if they choose to be recalcitrant, is almost impossible. You then run a deficit operation for a long time. You spend a lot of effort and legal fees and build up a lot of ill will. [Main Street] is not a big enough operation to support one person [on staff at RIOC to handle it]. It’s not a big enough job. It’s not a big enough deal, and yet you need that expertise to deal with the people you do have because it is an important part of life on the Island. Again, it’s a critical-mass kind of issue.
One of the reasons for Mas’s suggestion [to have one mall-type operator rent out all the spaces] is to just avoid all that. Deal with a big-time person who is experienced in that. RIOC is really not – I mean, they have a lawyer on their staff, or two sometimes, but not one of them is really equipped to go to civil court to deal with these issues on a current basis and in any way with real expertise, and it becomes a problem. That’s why one of the bases for Mas’s suggestion was to master-lease it and let somebody who knows what they’re doing do it, which is an interesting proposition. It needs to be thought about and talked about. It certainly would simplify life for RIOC. Whether it simplifies or makes better the life for residents is something else again; and that needs to be thought about and talked about....
You would thing that two years from the date of that interview is a reasonable enough amount of time to think and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of a Master Leaseholder - wouldn't you?
You would also think that the former Fish store evicted in February 2007, the former Capri Pizza store evicted in February 2006 and the former bakery evicted sometime before that would have been rented by now if an experienced private sector real estate developer with retail expertise controlled the premises - wouldn't you? Who knows when the recently vacated Flower shop and the soon to be vacated New York National Bank space will ever be rented again?
A reasonable question would be whether a qualified real estate developer would want to take over the Roosevelt Island Main Street Master Leaseholder. A reader asks about the Master Leaseholder idea:
Would be a great way to solve the problem, although with commercial real estate going in the tank like everything else who knows what developer would want to step up to the plate.
I asked David Kramer of the Hudson Companies, developer together with Related of the Riverwalk complex in Southtown, if his company had any interest in becoming the Master Leaseholder for the Main Street retail stores and he responded this way:
“The improvement and upgrade of the Main Street retail is one of the most important issues for us as developers of Riverwalk. We eagerly responded to the previous RFEI and were disappointed that it didn’t go anywhere; our excitement and interest in playing a role in Main Street retail is unchanged. We think the retail we’ve developed and operated in Riverwalk shows what is possible throughout the entire island, and we’re encouraged that the issue is back on RIOC’s radar.”
The issue is not complicated. RIOC is simply not qualified nor does it have the expertise to be a retail landlord. Turn the property over to a private retail developer who knows what it is doing and Roosevelt Island's Main Street will finally have some decent stores. That is what happened at Riverwalk Commons. We now have a Duane Reade, Starbucks, Pizza Place, Japanese Restaurant and a soon to be open Sports Bar & Grill as well as a Bagel Place. Free enterprise - Ain't it Great!
Roosevelt Island is a mixed income, racially diverse waterfront community situated in the East River of New York City between Manhattan and Queens and is jurisdictionally part of Manhattan. The Roosevelt Island Tramway, which connects Roosevelt Island to the rest of Manhattan, has become the iconic symbol of Roosevelt Island to its residents.
The Purpose of this Blog is to provide accurate and timely information about Roosevelt Island as well as a forum for residents to express opinions and engage in a dialogue to improve our community.
Main Street Image Of Roosevelt Island Is The Village From Glark
