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CityAndStateNY.com
February 14, 2022
By Annie McDonough
GARY HERSHORN/GETTY IMAGES
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HE MUCH-HYPED RETURN to in-person work office in New York City has not gone as planned. Despite high COVID-19 vaccination rates among adults in New York City and cases currently decreasing, the emergence of the delta and omicron variants postponed some companies’ timelines for returning to the office. Plus, some workers and companies aren’t sure if they’re ready to go back – or if they ever will be. The New York City comptroller’s office found in a recent report as of late January that time spent in workplaces was down 29% from pre-pandemic levels, according to Google mobility data. In midtown Manhattan, an area overwhelmingly reliant on commercial and tourist activity, it’s not just office buildings that have emptied out. A report last fall from the Real Estate Board of New York found that nearly 30% of storefronts in the office-dependent retail corridors of Midtown East and around Grand Central were unoccupied as of last summer. Before the pandemic, vacancy rates ranged from 10%-15%. “Pre-pandemic, they relied heavily on office workers and tourists, both of which have not returned in numbers close to the levels before COVID struck our city,” Andrew Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, said of restaurants in Midtown. “Now, nearly two years into the pandemic, the challenges continue to compound. And the uncertainty makes it very difficult to plan for the longevity of your business.” The challenges Midtown will likely confront in the coming years share some similarities with what lower Manhattan faced after 9/11 emptied out the then primarily commercial neighborhood in the early 2000s. Although the flight of workers from downtown office buildings didn’t last long, it helped to accelerate conversions of those commercial office buildings to residential buildings. Like the finance executives who the neighborhood had relied upon, lower Manhattan had to learn to diversify. With help from state and federal subsidy programs, those residential conversions ramped up. You started to see “strollers and dogs” on the streets of lower Manhattan, as Ross Moskowitz, a real estate partner at Stroock, put it. Those conversions were accompanied by efforts to sell lower Manhattan as a cultural and entertainment destination. Groups like Wall Street Rising, founded by now-City Council Member Julie Menin, promoted the neighborhood and its small businesses by hosting free art exhibitions and public concerts. Meanwhile, new kinds of commercial tenants in tech and media moved into the neighborhood’s gleaming new office towers. Though the pandemic still took a toll on lower Manhattan, that transformation arguably made the neighborhood more resilient. “Because lower Manhattan is more of a live-work-play neighborhood, you don’t see the same adverse impact on retail in lower Manhattan during the pandemic as you do in Midtown,” Basha Gerhards, senior vice president of planning at the Real Estate Board of New York, told the Commercial Observer. Some urban planning experts, real estate executives and local representatives agreed that lower Manhattan’s post-9/11 transformation holds lessons for how midtown Manhattan might reinvent itself when the city starts to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. “There’s not really a choice but to think about diversifying uses in Midtown, as we did in lower Manhattan after 9/11,” Kathryn Wylde, president and
