Death of NYC’s most beloved restaurants puts landlords in dangerhttps://nypost.com/2021/01/25/death-of-nycs-beloved-restaurants-puts-landlords-at-risk/The rolling wipeout of beloved New York City restaurants, which claimed the fabled 21 Club two weeks ago, might only be getting started.
And as painful as it would be to food lovers, it would hurt landlords even more as retail vacancies of all kinds mushroom in each of the five boroughs.
Many of the “couple of thousand†eatery closures to date, as estimated by the New York City Hospitality Alliance (NYCHA), were small neighborhood spots less “iconic†than media accounts claimed. But industry insiders fear that the coronavirus pandemic might soon drag down bigger fish — and a lot of them.
The potential loss of so much ground-floor space could be the last straw for landlords already reeling from the wider retail collapse and from some lenders’ reluctance to renegotiate terms amid COVID-19 restrictions.
Two interrelated issues are on the table here,
. The ongoing mass extinction of NYC restaurants (and other small businesses) is having drastic effects with their landowners. Utterly predictable. NYC has an image - insubstantial, but affecting customers' choices - of being a cuisine mecca. Image nuked. Eventually the higher-end and higher quality restauraunts will rebuild, but that's going to take years, not weeks.
