Category: Openings & Closings

Elements of SMOKEOUT Act pass in state budget

• by Kristen Guglielmo, Associate Editor, April 18, 2024
• From the Queens Chronicle

Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar, who has advocated for the bill at rallies around the city, announced in a press release that her SMOKEOUT Act was included in the state budget. PHOTO COURTESY NYS ASSEMBLY

The SMOKEOUT Act enables local municipalities to close illegal smoke shops if the location is an “egregious actor,” such as operating next to a school or selling unregulated cannabis. PHOTO BY KRISTEN GUGLIELMO

New York City and all local municipalities will now have the power to shut down illegal pot shops, according to Gov. Hochul. 

Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar (D-Woodhaven) penned the Stop Marijuana Over-proliferation and Keep Empty Operators of Unlicensed Transactions Act, colloquially known as the SMOKEOUT Act, to combat the illicit shops, and provisions from this bill are to be included in the state budget, according to a press release from her office. In the other house of legislature, the bill was carried by state Sen. Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans).

“Unlicensed dispensaries have littered New York neighborhoods, blatantly circumventing our laws and selling potentially dangerous products,” Hochul said Friday in a statement. “Enough is enough. I promised to protect our communities and hard-working, legal cannabis licensees by expediting the closure of illicit storefronts. I’m proud to stand up and say we got it done.”

The New York City Administrative Code will be amended, allowing the City to act under the law immediately. Hochul is also launching a statewide task force to carry out civil enforcement to close illegal stores.

“I am proud to say that New York City and all localities will now have the power to shut down illegal cannabis shops on their own, without waiting for the State Office of Cannabis Management,” Rajkumar explained. “In New York City, the Office of the Sheriff will now be able to deputize the NYPD and all agencies to help padlock the shops. This means New York City can use its full manpower to get the job done.”

Provisions include that localities can padlock a spot immediately, provided that the shop is an “egregious actor,” which is defined as selling cannabis to children, operating next to a school or place of worship, selling unregulated cannabis or products that lead to illness or hospitalization or the presence of illegal firearms.

Unlicensed shops that do not fall into one of the above categories can be closed upon a second inspection, and any previous inspection conducted before the passage of this law counts for the purposes of padlocking.

Violating a padlock order will be a Class A misdemeanor, and if landlords fail to bring forth eviction proceedings against tenants in violation of the cannabis law, they will be subject to strict penalties, including  a $50,000 fine for any landlord notified of the violation within NYC, and five times the rent from the time the landlord was notified of the violation outside of NYC.

There are also due process provisions that give violators a chance to “cure and be heard,” according to Rajkumar’s press release.

Violators can file an appeal within seven days and are entitled to a hearing on the appeal within three days of filing. A decision on the appeal must be rendered four days after the hearing, and failure to appeal leads to a default judgement against the egregious actor.

“We’ll notify bodega owners if they continue to sell illegal products, we’ll take away their liquor, tobacco and lottery licenses,” Hochul said Friday.

Rajkumar said that during the next few weeks, she will be raiding illegal shops alongside city Sheriff Anthony Miranda.

Mayor Adams has been an outspoken supporter of the legislation, and has said that if the bill passed, he would be able to shut down all of the city’s illegal smoke shops within 30 days.

Asked for comment, a City Hall spokesperson said, “We carried our bold agenda to Albany for several requests, and thanks to our efforts, this budget will achieve our core priorities, including the power to finally close down the illegal smoke shops plaguing our streets. Thanks to our work with Governor Hochul and other state partners, this budget will allow our city agencies to use the full force of the law to enforce against, regularly inspect, and permanently close illegal dispensaries more quickly and efficiently. 

“We celebrate the important steps forward we have made toward uplifting the legal cannabis market and ensuring New Yorkers are safe from illegal cannabis products and shops.”

The first Chelsea New York State dispensary has opened recently. Verdi is located at 158 West 23rd Street.

From AM New York:

By Emily Davenport

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.

From Bisnow

March 1, 2024 Sasha Jones, New York City 

Unsplash/Luca Bravo

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.

This article is from Bisnow.com.

Story by Finn Hoogensen  • WPIX TV

Verdi Cannabis, the first legal recreational weed dispensary in Chelsea, will officially open on Friday.

Verdi will be located at 158 W 23rd St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues in Manhattan.

Father-and-son duo Mitchell and Ellis Soodak are the owners of Verdi, which will sell state-regulated marijuana products.

“Our dispensary will stand out because of our knowledgeable and educated budtenders sell tested and regulated cannabis, as well as providing a safer option for consumers,” Ellis Soodak said.

Verdi will be open from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., Monday to Saturday, and from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Sundays.

A grand opening ceremony will be held at 11 a.m. on Friday.

“Verdi represents a new era for cannabis enthusiasts in Chelsea,” Ellis Soodak said. “Our goal is for Verdi to be more than just a dispensary as we aim to be a critically important community alternative to the illicit cannabis establishments that have saturated the Chelsea area.”

From Marketwatch.com

Story by Steve Gelsi  

The Travel Agency: A Cannabis Store is in line to be the first cannabis retail brand in New York State with multiple locations, as the legal-cannabis business starts gaining a foothold over illegal shops.

Separately, Curaleaf Holdings Inc. said it received special-use approval to open its first New York adult-use store, which will be located in Newburgh, a city about 70 miles north of New York City.

Curaleaf planned to kick off delivery service from the location this past weekend, with a soft opening by the end of January, pending state approval. New York-based Curaleaf has been providing cannabis to the medical market since 2017.

Curaleaf’s stock rose 7% on Friday. The shares are up by 23.5% in the past year, compared to a 37.4% rise by the Nasdaq

New York State’s legal-cannabis business is speeding up after a slow start due to some headwinds, including the cost of real estate and competition from literally thousands of unlicensed stores hawking unregulated cannabis products.

New York’s licensed-cannabis market generated only $150 million in sales in its first year of operation in 2023, less than the $274 million generated by the smaller state of Connecticut, which also kicked off adult-use sales about a year ago.

Gov. Kathy Hochul plans to propose legislation to crack down further on unlicensed cannabis shops. She’s also including a cannabis potency tax repeal and replacing it with a weight-based tax to “ease tax compliance” for distributors.

Hochul’s proposal comes mirrors a proposal in the state legislature to scrap the potency tax in favor of a 9% wholesale excise tax.

The idea is that cutting some cannabis taxes may lower the cost at the cash register and make legal pot more competitive with unregulated pot being sold in unlicensed stores.

Paul Yau, founder of the Travel Agency, said the effort by the state to cut taxes and close down unlicensed shops marks a positive move for the business.

“We 100% support trying to get rid of illicit stores,” Yau told MarketWatch, noting that Hochul made “having safe, tested, clean products” a priority by including a mention in her state-of-the-state address.

Cannabis companies have been slow to open for a variety of reasons. If a major bank holds a mortgage on a property, it may not allow a cannabis business to be a tenant because pot remains illegal under federal law.

Cannabis company operating expenses remain high because of these and other obstacles, he said.

Meanwhile, The Travel Agency is readying its second store at 118-122 Flatbush Avenue, near the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn, close to major public-transportation routes.

“We’re looking to make this the premier dispensary in Brooklyn,” Yau said.

The stores will initially open as a pop-up with 3,500 square feet, with 60 full-time and part-time workers, and then expand to 4,800 feet.

While adult-use cannabis has been approved since 2021, legal shops have been slow to gear up as the state awarded its first licenses to non-profits and people affected by the War on Drugs.

Travel Agency runs its two stores for license holders The Doe Fund in Manhattan and GMDSS LLC in Brooklyn.

The Travel Agency’s flagship store opened a year ago under the name Union Square Travel Agency just south of Union Square in Manhattan as the third overall retail cannabis shop in the state.

Now, the Travel Agency name will be used for both the original Union Square store and its downtown Brooklyn location, under a re-branding effort.

In November, the state also officially sanctioned its existing medical-use licensees to take part in the recreational market.

Those companies include Columbia Care, Curaleaf Holdings Inc., Etain, Nycanna LLC, PharmaCann and Valley Agriceuticals LLC

Companies with an existing presence in the state’s medical program include Curaleaf Holdings, RIV Capital Inc.   Green Thumb Industries Inc.  and privately held PharmaCann.

From CNBC:

WeWork was once valued at $47 billion. Now, the office-sharing company is in the throes of the bankruptcy process after its Monday filing. It has about $16 billion in long-term leases, which the company has been renegotiating. (Other than being the latest buzzy company to fall from grace, WeWork has been a key client for commercial real estate landlords already struggling with an inconsistent return-to-office patterns due to Covid.) The move plunged WeWork into a troubling new chapter of its staggeringly sharp and quick downfall, which was already fodder for a miniseries starring Jared Leto as founder Adam Neumann. For his part, Neumann, who stepped down as CEO in 2019 and received hefty payouts, called the bankruptcy filing “disappointing.”