Can Printemps Fix Fidi’s Wonky Retail Scene?
On the stretch of Broadway that runs through lower Manhattan, you can drop into a Zara, an Anthropologie, and an Urban Outfitters — mid-tier chains that are perfectly fine for an emergency work cardigan, but hardly something to make a special trip for. A handful of years ago, the Gap was replaced by a Gap Factory, which kind of sums up the vibe. But for many months now, the ground floor of One Wall Street has been covered in jaunty green signage advertising the impending arrival of Printemps, the first U.S. outpost of one of France’s oldest and most renowned department stores. Its opening this month will not only introduce something novel to the local shopping scene (including merchandise available for the first time in the United States) but also, many hope, a larger shift in the neighborhood’s retail fortunes.
The landmarked Red Room may be the most glamorous place to try on shoes in New York.
Photo: Courtesy of Printemps
When I toured the nearly completed space in February with Laura Lendrum, the CEO of Printemps America, she described a store that sounded very unlike the fluorescent-lit warren of branded product displays that define most American department stores. At Printemps New York, natural light streams in from windows facing Trinity Church, there are numerous places to stop for food and drink, and everything is arranged as if shoppers have entered a lavish French apartment, starting with a family-friendly “playroom” at the Broadway entrance with casual clothing and small gifts, followed by an upstairs “salon” (i.e., a grand living room) with jewelry, accessories, and ready-to-wear. Down a corridor lined with fragrance and skin-care products is the salle de bain, or bathroom, with displays of makeup, and a boudoir with fine jewelry, eveningwear, and haute couture. Then there’s the showstopper: the Red Room, a landmarked Art Deco masterpiece with 33-foot-high coved ceilings, double-height windows, and red-ombré and gold-mosaicked walls that serves as the setting for “a magic shoe forest,” with footwear on pedestals sprouting from the floor. The whole store, all 55,000, whimsical, Laura Gonzalez–designed square feet of it, seems to be steeped in the aesthetic of golden-era Hollywood, full of saturated colors and fantastical details. Even the dressing rooms are not the grim afterthoughts they are in so many stores; the one I saw looked like a little disco pod, ready to disgorge club-hopping partygoers.
The store, designed by Laura Gonzalez, is colorful and over the top.
Photo: Courtesy of Printemps
“If Printemps had gone to someplace more expected, if we were more in the fray” — say, to Madison Avenue or the Plaza District — “it would have been harder to pull something like this off,” Lendrum says. Being in a Financial District building provided the ability to experiment — while Printemps has not disclosed what it’s paying in rent, asking rents in Fidi are less than a third of what they are on Madison Avenue. Then there are the particulars of the Art Deco building itself, including a whole tower’s worth of customers who live upstairs (who can take advantage of personal-shopping services, and request a staffer bring up a selection of outfits to try on before a big night) and the incomparable Red Room. Designed to impress the original tenant’s top banking clients in the 1930s (a dazzling form of reassurance after the stock-market crash, apparently), it wooed the department store, too. Such features have apparently helped persuade others to take a chance on the neighborhood as well. Lendrum told me that a rep from a brand that she was trying to get in the store warned, “I don’t think we’ll do this,” before agreeing to a tour. Shortly after arriving, the rep was excitedly ticking off all the things she wanted to bring in.
Printemps says the decision to open at One Wall mirrored the thinking behind the location of its very first store. “When we opened in Paris in 1865, the Haussmann area was undergoing a major transformation,” a rep explained. Now, with the arrival of the Perelman Performing Arts Center, the Tin Building, Casa Cipriani, and more in Fidi, “it was only natural that we be the ones to pioneer the neighborhood’s retail footprint.” Others, apparently, are taking note: “We’ve also heard that a lot of retailers have looked at space down here because of us,” Lendrum says. “There’s a lot of buzz.”
Printemps, a 55,000-square-foot French department store with numerous restaurants, cafés, and bars, is likely to draw tourists, office workers, and residents.
Photo: Sukjong Hong
But still, Fidi? Many brokers remain skeptical that the neighborhood will emerge from its “identity crisis,” as one put it. “Obviously, Printemps’s opening is going to be huge,” says Chris DeCrosta, the co-founder of retail brokerage GoodSpace. “But it’s been an emerging market for the past 25 years.” When DeCrosta first moved to the neighborhood shortly after 9/11, it was “lots of delis catering to traders that could do things like make 30 turkey sandwiches and 30 iced teas for office lunches, a couple random jewelry/watch stores, and some low-level men’s apparel — places meant to serve the massive office market,” he says. (Most of the other retail had been at the World Trade Center.) A few years later, he did the Tiffany’s deal, bringing the jeweler to Wall Street (the landlord had been ready to sign a lease with a pizza place, he says). There was a lot of energy around the neighborhood’s rebuilding, and brands eager to be a part of that story. Around the same time, Hermès opened around the corner on Broad Street.
But then the area’s retail transformation largely stalled out. Today, the Financial District remains a hodgepodge of ultraluxury stores, discount clothiers (Ann Taylor, Loft, T.J.Maxx, and the most recent, a pared-down version of Century 21), and tourist emporiums. Besides Nobu, which moved to Fidi from Tribeca in 2017, and a trio of well-regarded Kent Hospitality spots at 70 Pine (Saga, Crown Shy, and Overstory), it’s known for an abundance of steakhouses, Pret a Mangers, and Irish pubs that have been around since time immemorial (well, maybe not the Prets, but their deli predecessors surely have). Tiffany’s and Hermès have stuck around, but across Broad Street from Hermès, where sweaters run some $2,000, sits an “I Love New York” tourist shop. “There’s no cohesive vision,” says DeCrosta. “If you look at Greene Street in Soho, there’s a cohesive vision: All the blue-chip luxury brands are there. Broadway in Soho is where the mass-market brands go. North Sixth Street in Williamsburg, there’s a thesis; Madison Avenue, there’s a thesis. The Financial District has no thesis.”
From left: Michelin-starred restaurants and luxury stores sit side by side with tchotchkes shops and fast-casual spots. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesPhoto: Sukjong Hong
From top: Michelin-starred restaurants and luxury stores sit side by side with tchotchkes shops and fast-casual spots. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images…
From top: Michelin-starred restaurants and luxury stores sit side by side with tchotchkes shops and fast-casual spots. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesPhoto: Sukjong Hong
Tara King-Brown, an associate broker at Corcoran, agrees but points out that businesses in the neighborhood are serving three very different populations: office workers, tourists, and, increasingly, residents. “I see a lot of it as the growing pains of a neighborhood going from predominantly commercial to predominantly residential,” King-Brown says. The neighborhood added 3,559 new housing units between 2010 and 2020, according to NYU’s Furman Center. And there is a lot more housing on the way, especially with a number of office-to-residential conversions in the works or already completed, including One Wall Street, the Art Deco tower where Printemps is located, which has 566 units, and 25 Water Street, the largest office-to-residential conversion in the U.S., which will bring 1,300 new units. There are so many new apartments coming to market that residential brokers say it’s taking some time to metabolize all of it.
And the neighborhood’s new residents have money to spend: The Financial District had the city’s highest median income in 2022 and its most expensive rent, according to Furman. One Wall’s retail offerings are squarely aimed at them: In addition to Printemps, there’s also a Whole Foods and a Life Time fitness center, which one broker described to me as similar to Equinox but “more of an elevated, wraparound experience, with chiropractic services, cold plunge, a hair and nail salon,” along with the expected gym amenities and classes. However, DeCrosta pointed out that a lot of the luxury brands (Gucci, Bottega, Burberry) are already at Brookfield Place, close to the Goldman Sachs headquarters, and between that and Soho, luxury brands might not need another downtown location.
The view from Hermès, looking out at a tourist shop and a CityMD. There’s another tourist shop one door down.
Photo: Sukjong Hong
That’s why so many people are waiting to see how Printemps’s big bet plays out. Will other luxury brands follow in its wake? DeCrosta says that he’s watching to see what happens at 23 Wall Street, the old J.P. Morgan building a block over that’s been vacant for decades. In 2016, it was supposed to sell to Uniqlo but that, and a subsequent plan to put a Blink Fitness in the basement, fell through. Now would be an auspicious time to land a high-profile tenant. “If 23 Wall leases to someone great, there are legs in the neighborhood,” he says. And Fidi has a lot to tempt potential tenants: Besides its wealthy denizens, it has the lowest retail rents of any major Manhattan shopping district — $233 per square foot, according to Cushman & Wakefield — which can be both good and bad in a place like New York. High rents signal desirability, but if they get too out of hand, they can also lead to a mass exodus of retailers, as happened with Times Square about a decade ago. Low rents, on the other hand, can be a good thing, especially if they coincide with good transit and heavy foot traffic, conditions able to draw and sustain an interesting mix of retail.
“I feel like it took longer to come back from COVID than other areas of the city, but we’re definitely seeing more and more interest from retailers and restaurants wanting to be down there,” says Lee Block, president at retail brokerage Winick Realty Group. At the end of 2024, the neighborhood’s vacancy rate was 19 percent, down from 20.7 percent a year prior, according to Cushman & Wakefield — not much of an improvement but, post-COVID, not so terrible either. (Herald Square’s was 33.9 percent.) And things have been picking up: Sephora, which used to have a Lower Broadway store, signed a lease for 5,000 square feet at 175 Broadway in December, along with Barcade. Brooks Brothers is also opening a 10,000-square-foot store at 195 Broadway after shutting down its One Liberty Plaza store in 2018. And last year, Miniso, a Chinese brand with locations in Times Square and Soho, opened a third location two blocks away.
Block and Winick have also done a lot of service-oriented deals of late: a Bond Street vet and a doggy day care, both on Maiden Lane — signs that the offerings in the neighborhood are more in line with what residents need and maybe a little less all over the place. “For a long time, Broadway was affected because of the space that opened in Brookfield Place, the Oculus, and the Seaport,” says Jordan Kaplan, a CBRE broker, who, with Eric Gelber, did the Brooks Brothers deal. “But a lot of places are coming back now. Broadway is just incredibly accessible.” Many retailers want foot traffic, not a mall on the far side of the West Side Highway. Fidi is also an amazing transit hub. And, in the midst of all these changes, a number of people noted that Printemps will bring something that’s been missing from the area: a shopping experience that’s as appealing to residents as it is to tourists and office workers. It’s fancy, sure, but unlike at Hermès or Tiffany’s, you can get a $5 coffee, ogle a $2,000 bag, wander around for an hour, and leave with a $50 eye cream, a notebook, or nothing at all.
King-Brown, the real-estate agent who lived in the neighborhood from 2012 to 2023, says that the Financial District retail will always have three or four different faces — it’s been a commercial district for longer than any other place in Manhattan, and its many eras and inhabitants are reflected in the odd jumble of stores and restaurants you find there. It can feel confusing when you walk down the street, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The mix of South Street Seaport tourist traps, happy-hour bars, fast-casual chains, food halls, four-star restaurants, ultra high-end stores, luxury gyms, discount outlets, 19th-century hole-in-the-walls, and, as of this week, a French department store, is, in fact, very much New York.
