WSJ Offers Tidbits About Montague Street’s “High-Rent Retail Strip”

By on January 30, 2012 10:57 am in brooklyn bridge park, Brooklyn Heights, Commercial Real Estate

A short piece in today’s Wall Street Journal “What’s The Deal” column, offers a few morsels about retail in Brooklyn Heights. Focusing on Le Pain Quotidien coming to 121 Montague Street, the story notes that this is the cafe’s first Brooklyn store, with 10+ already in Manhattan.

Glenn Markman, an executive VP at Cushman Wakefield, shares that rents currently run as high as $250 per square foot along Montague’s “high-rent retail strip,” and notes that the Starbucks there is scouting for a new location.

In addition, the article says: “The Le Pain Quotidien deal comes as Brooklyn Heights retailers are enjoying a surge of new business from new hotels and apartment buildings that have opened in the past few years. More foot traffic is expected in the area from the planned Squibb Park Bridge that will make it easier to reach Brooklyn Bridge Park from the Heights, scheduled to open this fall.” Markman says it will be “a game changer.”

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  • Flashlight Worthy

    I think you mean 10+, not 100+. Also, where’s a link to the WSJ piece?

  • Gerry

    Brooklyn Heights retailers are NOT enjoying a surge in new business most are hanging on by a thread.

  • stuart

    “high rent retail” does not usually connote businesses hanging on by a thread. On the contrary, it means businesses on very busy streets with very high foot traffic and affluent customers.

  • Hicks on hicks

    Please add the WSJ link.

  • Bette

    I’m not sure what the article meant by “Starbucks is scouting for a new location”. Does that mean that Starbucks is leaving Montague Street? or just adding a new store? Atlantic Avenue has 4 or 5 vacant storefronts that might work for them…

    I also think when these articles mention “Brooklyn Heights” they’re really talking about Dumbo which does have new businesses and seems to be growing. Our little pocket seems rather stagnant.

  • Marnia

    For those who are looking for the original WSJ text:

    Tasty Tenant

    “Montague Street, the high-rent retail strip in Brooklyn Heights, is about to get a new tenant.

    Le Pain Quotidien, the trendy bakery and café, has plans to open its first Brooklyn location at 121 Montague St., in retail space formerly occupied by a Jennifer Convertible furniture store, according to a person familiar with the matter. The trendy bakery and café, whose name means “the daily bread,” has over 10 locations in Manhattan.

    Terms of the deal weren’t available. But Glenn Markman, an executive vice president at Cushman & Wakefield, says that Montague Street rents can run as high as $250 per square feet. Mr. Markman, who owns two buildings on Montague Street, says that Starbucks also has been scouting the strip for a new outlet.

    The Pain Quotidien deal comes as Brooklyn Heights retailers are enjoying a surge of new business from new hotels and apartment buildings that have opened in the past few years. More foot traffic in the area also is expected from the planned Squibb Park Bridge that will span Furman Street and make it easier for pedestrians to reach Brooklyn Bridge Park from the Heights. It’s scheduled to open in the fall of this year, according to the Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Web site.

    “It will be a real game changer,” Mr. Markman says.”

    From Peter Grant

  • David on Middagh

    I’m not necessarily opposed to the Squibb Park Bridge, but I don’t see how a long walkway from the wrong side of Furman Street, where nobody lives, will bring more business to where people do live. At least, not until the separate sections of Brooklyn Bridge Park have become so unified that visitors are free-flowing from DUMBO to Atlantic Avenue.

    Most customers of the hotel complex that is threatened would just cross Furman at street level and hike up the hill, as people do now.

  • Jorale-man

    I’m also curious about the new hotels that the story refers to. The Marriott?

    It seems that to talk about a boom is overstating things. La Traviata closed, the gift store on Hicks near Montague is closing. I think @Bette is correct – it’s more stagnant than anything else.

  • north heights res

    As a writer, I add my voice to those seeking a link to the original article; copying & pasting the text in the comments without the link adds insult to injury.

    The politics of aggregating — of taking other reporters’/writers’ content to drive traffic to your own site — are dubious to begin with. But to take others’ content without a link at all is parasitic and unethical.

    That one needs a subscription to the WSJ to read it isn’t an excuse for taking the paper’s and the reporter’s work for the benefit of this site.

  • Marnia

    @north heights:

    Easy there. Full credit was given to both the WSJ and the reporter who wrote the article, along with the requisite quotation marks. This is a local blog, not a national publication. I Googled the article, which I was able to read with free access, because others for some reason could not. Personally, I am often frustrated by a lack of information in some posts — information that takes the writer little or no time to add, no matter their experience.

    As an aside, I’m fully schooled in high journalistic standards, also from years of experience with top news organizations. The underlying issue is the evolving business model of platform-agnostic media, for better or worse. We can’t make it or break it that easily, though sometimes it feels that way.

  • http://loscalzo.posterous.com Homer Fink

    I’ve added a link to the full WSJ piece in the post above.

  • Teresa

    Marnia, without credit, it’s plagiarism, as you know. Simply giving credit isn’t, in my opinion, enough. If someone did this with something I wrote without providing a link, I’d be steamed. It’s theft; someone else selling their own advertising on my story, for which I wasn’t paid by the people posting it.

    Blogs have always provided links to the content that they discuss, and I’d be surprised if BHB didn’t want to hew to journalistic conventions and standards.

    And like you, I’m pretty familiar with the practices and ethics (or lack thereof) of aggregators, blogs, and other online sources, having been both their beneficiary and victim as a professional writer. And yes, I know that similar practices take place in print media as well.

    If you’re going to post someone else’s story, the least you can do is offer readers the chance to read the work of the original reporter and publication, who put all the effort into the story.

    The practice of taking other people’s stories and re-purposing them for one’s own publication is a whole other topic, common though the practice be.