#Broadway has 335 vacant storefronts amid rising rents, COVID-19: report

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Boarded up and closed stores on Broadway between 29th and 30th Streets in Manahttan.
Stefano Giovannini

The lights are out on Broadway — and not just around the Theater District.

A new report found that Manhattan’s famed, 13-mile thoroughfare has 335 vacant storefronts — a 78 percent jump from 2017 — with about 25 percent of new closures due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the study released Friday by Borough President Gale Brewer.

“Our survey reflects both relentlessly rising rents and the pandemic’s devastating toll on businesses,” Brewer said.

“If this unfortunate trend continues, we stand to lose a lot of neighborhood character and what makes our borough special, particularly in our shopping districts from Chinatown all the way up to Little Dominican Republic. New York City without a vibrant Broadway is unimaginable,” Brewer said.

Thanks to a local law co-sponsored by Brewer, a citywide database with information about vacancies including the properties’ landlords, length of leases, floor area and current rent will go live in February.

In 2017, Brewer’s office counted 188 storefront closures along 244 blocks of Broadway. By August 2020 it was up to 335 vacancies including 42 shops that were boarded up with plywood and 33 that were closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most of the vacancies were between 14th and 59th streets.

The shuttered storefronts are not a problem unique to Manhattan. In July the Partnership for New York City found that a third of the city’s 230,000 small businesses may never reopen following the coronavirus shutdown.

The partnership, a business group with corporate members who employ 1.5 million New Yorkers, wrote Mayor de Blasio Thursday imploring him to crackdown on crime and quality of life issues so people can safely return to work.