Nostrand Ave: Many Hair Salons, No Cafés
Back in 2007, the New York Sun ran an article with the title Retailers So Far Fail To Follow Homebuyers to North Crown Heights. From the article: While homebuyers see the area’s potential, new businesses are proving harder to attract. Along Nostrand, for example, many stores have old facades and rundown signs. Graffiti covers the…
Back in 2007, the New York Sun ran an article with the title Retailers So Far Fail To Follow Homebuyers to North Crown Heights. From the article:
While homebuyers see the area’s potential, new businesses are proving harder to attract. Along Nostrand, for example, many stores have old facades and rundown signs. Graffiti covers the security gates over the storefronts. While heavy on nail and hair salons and barbershops, the commercial strip lacks basic services such as a bank branch. “People are buying nice homes and spending good money and there are no services,” a project coordinator for the North Crown Heights Merchants Association, who is a sales agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate, Barbara Brown-Allen, said. “They don’t know the spending power that’s here.”
A year and a half later, the blog Nostrand Park decided to try to put some numbers to that assertion by doing a store-by-store analysis of the retail options on Nostrand Avenue between Eastern Parkway and Atlantic Avenue. The five most represented categories were Hair/Braiding Salons (13%), Variety Shops (11%), Caribbean Take-Out (10%), Bodegas/Delis (8%) and Nail Salons (5%). On the flip side, the survey found that there was not a single dine-in restaurant, café, book store or art store on the entire strip.
Nostrand Avenue North Retail Survey [Nostrand Park]
Photo by filmlynx
M4L- I think the whole tech savvy market is pretty much overlooked in this neighborhood but I see flyers for people now who repair computers and teach people how to use programs, and kids today use computers for schoolwork. Many older people have them- even if they don’t like them :-)- but there are a lot of business people around here and they do use them. I think there is a market for it and a place doesn’t have to be Starbucks to do well. We want good- we don’t have to have fancy.
LLstone, true true. Let me reframe my point. retail is a low success investmt to begin with. So if it’s a choice of catering to the existing community (ie like my post above to MM) vs. what is perceived to be trend of newbies coming into the hood and gaining mass density, I’m saying it’s better to the mkt that is there currently and the bigger share of the mkt than to build it & hope they come pricier mkt.
rob- maybe you should stop navel gazing so much and get around more. You seem to have a very limited social/cultural experience and that’s a shame. For the record- never a Friends fan, but at least I have quite a few.
MM, I beg to differ on the wi-fi coffee shops. Not doubting how tech savy is the hood but rather those wi-fi coffee shops would charge coffee, food, etc at price points I think is “EXPENSIVE” and be out of sync with the addressible mkt (ie out of business soon). That kind of coffee shop is a high mark-up (think Starbucks kind prices) but low transactions. To ensure success in CHN, price point needs to hit the addressible mkt – an inexpensive price that’ll generate high transaction volume daily and frequent visits by recurring customers.
more4less – totally untrue. All of the newer businesses on Franklin and Classon are doing very well (Glass House, Chavella’s, Franklin Park, Abagails, etc). It is a stretch to say that just one can’t survive on Nostrand? I know of many residents in that neighborhood that are hoping for something similar.
The question is not so much do the shops fill a need in the community, the question is do they address many or most of the needs of the community.
Even as a black woman of Caribbean decent who needs to get her hair “did” every now and again, I say that the shops, while necessary in the ‘hood, are not sufficient to address the needs of the broader community.
I grew up on oxtail and curry, but sometimes I just want some steak. Plus, there are so many artists and artisans in the community (some of whom who have been here for ages) but outside of the parade and Five Myles, there is nothing that really showcases their work. These things are not reflected on Nostrand.
Nostrand Ave. does not reflect the broader community. Let’s not think that the residents of Crown Heights, new or old, are so one dimensional that we cannot appreciate both curry and coffee!
“That could easily work here, and if I had the bucks, I’d do it myself in a minute.”
Is anyone in BK trying the Community Supported Restaurant model? It worked in Vermont. Community members give cash to the owner and then get their investment back through meals, drinks, etc.
http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/79214/
quote:
rrob- that is so not he coffee shops I want or go to. I want a great spot to sit, look at the people, enjoy my friends and say hi to everyone. Over a good cup of coffee with maybe a nice breakfast plate. A place like this owuld get so much neighborhood business it would make their head spin.
perhaps you should put your time machine back to the 90s and visit a show called Friends.
*rob*
Walking down Nostrand and Fulton Mall always brings to mind that old Ice Cube song “Us”:
“Us will always sing the blues, cause all we care about is hairstyles and tennis shoes”