THE only large vacant store front on Fifth Avenue’s prime shopping stretch won’t likely stand vacant for very long.
Sources said trendy downtown retailers are swarming like bees over the former Brooks Brothers corner site at 666 Fifth Ave. at 53rd Street. Among those crunching numbers are Japan’s Uniqlo, which conquered Lower Broadway last year, Britain’s Topshop, which made a big splash in SoHo this spring and would love to be in the heart of Midtown, and discount department store Century 21.
Also in the running are Spain’s Zara, which already has a Fifth Avenue outpost at 54th Street but wants more elbow room, and Forever 21, which is opening a megastore in Times Square.
“Right now, Uniqlo and Topshop would appear to be the front-runners,” a source said. The 30,000 square-foot, two-level former Brooks Brothers space has an annual asking rent of $30 million, according to insiders.
“The competition is fierce,” said Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Faith Hope Consolo, who is not involved at the location.
The retail scene is demoralized — as anyone can attest who was at the spring International Council of Shopping Centers CSC convention in Las Vegas, where attendance was off nearly 50 percent from previous years.
But Fifth Avenue from 49th to 59th street seems immune to the malaise. While many Midtown avenues and streets have canyons of store space up for grabs, Fifth’s golden half-mile is full, except for the Brooks site and a tiny space recently abandoned by Sergio Rossi.
It’s a stretch where ultra-high-end names like Bergdorf Goodman and DeBeers coexist happily with mall brands like Diesel and Banana Republic — all benefiting from a tourist tide that’s heating up again as the dollar weakens following its fourth-quarter boomlet.
While 666 Fifth’s office portion is owned by Kushner Cos., the tower’s 90,000-odd square-foot retail base is owned by a partnership of Crown Acquisitions, Kushner and Carlyle Group.
Last year, the partners bought Brooks out of its way-below-market lease for $47 million. The store is moving to Sixth Avenue while keeping and expanding its original Madison Avenue flagship.
About half of Brooks’ space was supposed to be taken over by Abercrombie & Fitch for a new kids’-line store. But it decided instead to take a mid-block space at 666 Fifth that unexpectedly became available when Hickey Freeman, a unit of bankrupt Hartmarx, announced it will close that store.
In the new location, Abercrombie will have 20 percent more precious ground-floor space, despite slightly less overall square-footage.
Despite a popular view that Manhattan retail’s center of gravity has shifted downtown, num bers we’ve pieced together from various sources tell a different story.
Stores with outposts both on Fifth Avenue and in SoHo see much higher sales volume in the uptown locations, despite the fact that Fifth closes up a lot earlier than SoHo.
For example, Zara’s location in the former Gucci space at Fifth and 54th Street is said to rake in $25 million a year compared with $18 million at a similarly sized SoHo store. (Sources said that sportswear chain Mango is “hot” for Zara’s 54th Street space should Zara move to 666 Fifth).
The real mind-boggler, though, is Apple.
Before the GM Building was sold to a Boston Properties partnership last year, a prospectus shown to possible purchasers revealed the Apple store under the famous glass cube was doing an incredible $440 million a year. By comparison, sources said, Apple’s outpost at Prince and Greene streets does $100 million. (The uptown Apple is larger, but not by much — it has an estimated 10,000 square feet of selling space compared with 8,500 feet in SoHo.)
Asked to comment on what we’d heard about sales volume, Cushman & Wakefield’s Brad Mendelson, 666 Fifth’s retail leasing agent, said: “While we never divulge confidential data, Fifth Avenue remains the preeminent shopping street with higher volumes than anywhere in the world.”