Lower Manhattan Leads New York in Languishing Retail Space
Multiple new analyses of Lower Manhattan’s retail landscape say that the local business community is struggling, but at least not getting much worse. “State of the Chains, 2025,” a new report from the Center for an Urban Future (CUF), a public policy think tank, documents that Downtown lost seven chain stores in the year that recently ended, but gained eight. This net gain of a single chain store amounts to breaking even in a community where a total of 367 corporately branded retail outlets is currently operating. But not losing any chains is a significant improvement over the performance of the past two years, when the CUF documented that 20 chain outposts shuttered in 2024, along with 15 in 2023.
A second analysis, from the City’s Department of Small Business Services (SBS), looks at the total number of retail storefronts, rather than those occupied by corporate chains. According to the SBS, Community Board 1 (CB1) has the highest retail vacancy rate of any district in the five boroughs. Among 2,243 storefronts located within CB1, 23.81 percent (or 535 locations) are currently unoccupied. This represents a slight improvement from the 2024 vacancy rate of 24.12 percent, which was also the highest anywhere in New York City. SBS says that the average storefront within CB1 employs 10.86 staff and pays $45,933 in annual sales taxes. These metrics suggest that vacant retail spaces in Lower Manhattan represent more than 6,000 lost jobs and $25.5 million in annual tax revenue forgone.
Case in point: the windows are dark at 119 West Broadway, the former home of Boomerang Toys. Karen Barwick, a Lower Manhattan resident who with her husband raised a family here, founded the popular toy store in the fall of 2002, but closed at the end of 2025.
Concluding the year with a somewhat brighter outlook is a third analysis, from the Downtown Alliance, which notes that 27 new retail establishments opened in Lower Manhattan during the third quarter of 2025, and four closed during the same three-month period. The report predicts that an additional 26 new local storefronts are slated to open soon.