Forget offices: Young, hip New Yorkers bringing Midtown back
Move over, Williamsburg. Here comes … Midtown?
Residents and brokers who specialize in the area — known for aging office buildings and executives — say it has been transforming during the city’s recovery, getting younger, hipper and trendier.
It can surely use the new blood.
The skyscraper-laden district stretching from 34th Street to Central Park South was disemboweled by the pandemic and continues to bleed office tenants, even as other pockets of the city appear ready to move on from the pandemic.
Banks and tech companies have been looking to the south and west, with companies including Google and Meta Platforms buying space in lower Manhattan and HSBC signing a 20-year lease in Hudson Yards. Meanwhile, with occupancy rates remaining low, the total value of New York’s office buildings fell for the first time in over two decades.
That’s cast a cloud of uncertainty over the neighborhood, which is home to some of the city’s most iconic real estate.
But while older office towers languish, brokers say young home buyers have flocked to the neighborhood, eager to take advantage of prices that haven’t soared like they have in the rest of Manhattan and much of Brooklyn.
“All of a sudden we have people moving from Downtown, all of a sudden you have these people who think it’s cool to be living further up,” said Bertrand Buchin, a real estate agent with Douglas Elliman. “They won’t go to the Upper East Side, but they think it’s cool to live in Midtown.”
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“Everyone’s talking crap about Midtown and it's because they don't know about the retail deals,” Abrams said. “They’re talking about the office occupancy, but from the retail and residential standpoint it seems like it's on fire.”
David Abrams, masonre
David Abrams, founder and CEO of masonre, a commercial real estate firm, said demand for Midtown retail space has spiked among “cooler” health and fitness brands in the past three months, and that smart operatives knew to start looking there last summer. It’s a sign the neighborhood is in fact skewing younger, he said: Brands only want to maintain a presence in areas where they have customers.
Restaurant and club owners have also taken note of the neighborhood’s changing demographics.
Among the recent arrivals are Pebble Bar on West 49th Street, which boasts a star-studded investor roster including Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson; The Hugh, a food court that opened in November at 601 Lexington Avenue that’s home to places like KazuNori; and Lodi, an Italian cafe opened at 1 Rockefeller Center last summer by the owners of Village staple Altro Paradiso.
Buchin said he found out the hard way that Lodi caters to locals when he showed up for an impromptu drink with a friend on a recent weekend afternoon.
“At 3:15 I thought I was going to get in there and they told me it’s an hour-and-15-minute wait,” Buchin said. “It’s young people on the terrace, not the same crowd that comes to look at Rockefeller Center … You never would have seen this three years ago.”