Sam Ash’s Midtown store is closing for good. Photo by Dean Moses
Sam Ash’s Midtown location is reportedly closing its doors for good. It was reported by w42st.com that the famed store, located at 333 W 34th St., would be closing down after a century of business in the neighborhood. Originally founded in 1924, the music chain originated in New York, with the first store opened by the Ash family in Brooklyn.
Photo by Dean Moses
The W 34th Street store is reportedly one of 18 stores that are closing across the country, which also reportedly includes Sam Ash’s Huntington Station location on Long Island and its Forest Hills location in Queens.
Liquidation signs appeared in the windows of the Midtown store, signaling sales and the store’s impending closure.
“For the last 100 years, Sam Ash Music has successfully adapted to meet the challenge of changing business conditions. As we look towards the next 100 years, the company must continue to adapt to ensure its continued success,” Sam Ash told amNewYork Metro in a statement. “Sam Ash Music remains committed to keeping a strong physical store footprint in the future while we continue growing our successful online sales offerings. As part of this restructuring, the company is closing several stores nationwide. This restructuring is emotionally tough, but we are confident these moves will make Sam Ash Music stronger as we continue serving the music community into the future, as we have for the past 100 years.”
Manhattan Real Estate Tracker visited the store yesterday and most items are now 10% with no returns accepted.
Manhattan Real Estate Tracker has learned that Avi Hiaeve, the founder and CEO of the luxury timepiece and jewelry firm Avi & Co., purchased the former Playboy Club building at 5 East 59th Street at a foreclosure auction. The bid was approximately $26.7 million. The previous investors had purchased the property for $85 million.
The Chrysler Building is attempting to reposition itself by marketing to high-end retail tenants.
The iconic Chrysler Building has signed its first tenant following a retail makeover that aims to bring an air of modern luxury into the challenged art deco landmark.
WatchHouse, a British coffee shop that recently opened its first U.S. store at 660 Fifth Ave., will open its second location at the base of the Chrysler Building. It signed a lease for 2K SF on 43rd Street, across from an entrance to Grand Central Terminal.
Retail by Mona CEO Brandon Singer, who led broker teams that represented the tenant and landlord RFR, said the lease reflects the vision for the building’s retail.
“It’s creating a destination for retail that is a little bit outside of the box, given the amazing asset,” Singer told Bisnow. “With all the dense office buildings in this area, this will help the people coming back to work. Give them an experience that they may not have had in the past.”
As tenants opt for amenity-rich, Class-A towers, owners of historic buildings like the Chrysler Building are attempting to find a role for their properties to play in a remote work world.
Singer’s team is marketing several spaces on the 1,046-foot-tower’s ground floor, in addition to storefronts on the arcade level, which totals 30K SF alone. RFR is also considering adding retail use to the second floor.
It is reinventing the Cloud Club lounge on the 61st and 62nd floors as part of a renovation that RFR co-founder Aby Rosen told Bloomberg in 2020 would cost at least $200M.
“We wanted to create something nice — food, wine, dry cleaning, shavers, hairdressers — so tenants have a reason to stay longer instead of running out,” Rosen told Bloomberg at the time.
Singer declined to provide further details on the building’s upgrades. RFR declined to comment.
The Chrysler Building previously housed retail tenants that served daily Midtown commuters, including a barbershop, a shoeshine, a dry cleaner, a locksmith and an optometrist — but all of them vacated in 2020. In its next chapter, the building will focus on higher-end tenants that could appeal to shoppers outside of the 9-to-5 work schedule, Singer said.
Most recently, the building, once the world’s tallest, has been caught in the collapse of Austrian property company Signa. The firm, founded by investor René Benko, filed for insolvency in November, and it is looking to unload its 50% stake in the skyscraper.
Rosen had been in talks to renegotiate the building’s long-term ground lease with The Cooper Union since he and Signa acquired the leasehold in 2019. Signa’s insolvency complicated those efforts, and RFR is on the hook for more than $31.5M in annual ground rent payments, the New York Post reported in November.
The Chrysler Building’s retail repositioning is similar to that of its rival Empire State Building. Empire State ownership added a three-story Starbucks Reserve store to its retail base in 2022. In 2019, it debuted a $165M redevelopment, which added a museum and made improvements to its observatory.
Empire State Realty Trust, the owner of the Empire State Building, said in its annual report that the observatory generated $129.4M in revenue, a sixth of the REIT’s total from last year. The 91K SF of retail in that building was 76.4% leased at the end of 2023.
NEW YORK — Five years after Albany Democrats overhauled the state’s rent-stabilization laws, real estate executives are looking to weaken the reforms — bolstered by data they commissioned that validates their case.
New findings from a survey of 781 property owners and managers covering about 242,000 units contend the 2019 changes led to disinvestment and substantial vacancies in rent-stabilized housing. A significant share of respondents said it is “economically infeasible” to invest in needed upgrades to their buildings. The study, obtained by POLITICO, was conducted by consulting firm HR&A Advisors on behalf of the Real Estate Board of New York and the Rent Stabilization Association. While the findings are unsurprising, real estate leaders are using them to fuel their argument against the 5-year-old legislative changes.
The issue is now entering the early stages of negotiations in Albany, amid broader discussions around a wide-ranging deal to tackle an acute housing shortage.
Tenant activists and progressive lawmakers are already pushing back on any attempt to reverse the reforms, which starts out as a tall order in the Democratic-led state Legislature.
“This data indicates that the 2019 rent law changes are having increasingly negative impacts on rent-stabilized apartments and tenants,” James Whelan, president of REBNY, said in a statement. “State lawmakers should follow the data and advance policies that facilitate the rehabilitation of dilapidated apartments in a manner that results in quality affordable housing without recreating the dynamics of vacancy decontrol.”
Real estate groups argue the 5-year-old changes — which eliminated or significantly curtailed avenues to raise rents on the city’s roughly 1 million rent-regulated apartments — have left landlords unable to rehab apartments and rerent them when long-term tenants move out.
The idea — called “self serving” by a leading tenant activist — has gained traction among some moderate Democrats: A bill introduced last year by state Sen. Leroy Comrie and Assemblymember Kenny Burgos would allow rent-stabilized landlords to reset rents at vacancy to facilitate renovations. The current law allows only very limited increases if an owner is making an apartment or building improvement.
Some prominent legislators see Comrie’s introduction as a non-starter and question the industry’s claims.
“They’re saying, let’s turn the rent-regulation system on its head because we have many units that are in dire disrepair — I don’t buy that,” said Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, chair of the body’s housing committee. “Many of my colleagues oppose that vehemently, so I don’t think it will gain much traction, and it shouldn’t. This is not the time to be trying to undo tenant protections.”
The survey found that for owners with small portfolios that are primarily rent-stabilized — those under 11 units — 25 percent of their apartments are currently vacant.
There are also fewer total vacant apartments than there were in 2018, but longer-term vacancies — defined as three years or more — have increased, the REBNY-commissioned survey found. And nearly one-third of respondents cited “economic infeasibility” of unit improvements after a long tenancy as a reason for continued vacancies.
RSA supports the bill introduced by Comrie and Burgos. REBNY is not pushing that specific legislation but said it agrees with its general goals, and sees it as one potential approach.
“There’s no way to adjust rent at vacancy anymore in the rent-stabilized universe,” Basha Gerhards, senior vice president of planning at REBNY, said in reference to landlords’ reported drop in operating income. “So do we allow some form of rent reset in exchange for the apartments being improved and the violations being cleared? It’s a question we are posing.”
State lawmakers are under pressure to take action on housing issues this year as the city struggles with the lowest rental vacancy rate in 50 years and residential construction slows amidst the absence of a key multi-family housing tax break.
After Democrats took control of the chamber, they eliminated “vacancy decontrol” — a mechanism that allowed units to leave the rent-stabilization program when they reached a certain threshold and became vacant. They additionally got rid of a provision that permitted landlords to raise rents by 20 percent when apartments became vacant, and significantly restricted rent increases attached to building and apartment improvements.
Those provisions had led to the loss of tens of thousands of rent-regulated apartments before the 2019 reforms went into effect.
The survey found owners still need to make those upgrades — things like replacing boilers or kitchen appliances — but are pursuing fewer improvements since they no longer pencil out financially. For example, RSA members filed 763 individual apartment improvements in 2023, down from 3,311 in 2019. For individual apartment improvements, the maximum landlords can spend on renovations that would be eligible for a rent increase calculation is $15,000 over 15 years.
“Whether it’s big systems like rewiring or plumbing, or bringing [units] up to code, complying to lead paint regulations — that’s well over $15,000 for an apartment, so there’s just no incentive,” said Frank Ricci, an executive vice president at RSA.
The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development estimated last year there are only 2,500 low-cost apartments that are both in need of repairs and have been vacant for a year or more. The agency says that figure is significantly lower now, based on the latest housing and vacancy survey, though it has not yet released a specific number, according to Gothamist. Ricci argued smaller buildings are under-surveyed by the city survey.
“By and large, there are just not that many vacant rent-stabilized apartments in New York City right now,” said Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for the Housing Justice for All coalition, pointing to HPD’s data. “It’s very politically convenient and self-serving to say, oh we’re in trouble because of the [2019 reforms.] But it’s like no, you’re in trouble because you speculated on buildings that are 100 years old and a pandemic happened and other costs changed.”
Weaver and other progressive activists said they’re nonetheless taking the push very seriously — and reject any attempts to include it in a broader housing agreement, even if that deal includes a longstanding priority known as “good cause” eviction. That measure would effectively limit rent hikes in market-rate apartments.
“For the left, we know what rollbacks have felt like — we experienced that in the bail reform fight,” said Jasmine Gripper, co-director of the Working Families Party. “We’ve been communicating to elected leaders that this is a non-starter.”
