The Original Barneys

I saw this last week during my morning newsletter scroll.

Watermark Capital Group has acquired the former Barneys building at 101 Seventh Avenue in Chelsea and plans to convert it into a 44-unit rental development with retail on the ground floor. The project will include permanently rent-stabilized, affordable housing under the city’s 467-m conversion program. The site, which Barneys occupied from 2016 to 2019 before shuttering, has since sat vacant aside from a temporary Spirit Halloween. Watermark secured a $10.5 million loan for acquisition and pre-development, with the building’s layout and zoning already suited for residential use.

The first thing that came to mind was the original beautiful elegant spiral staircase designed by Andree Putman. Architect Steven Harris designed the second one when Barneys re-opened in 2016. It was a nod but it wasn’t the same. Perry Capital acquired a significant chunk of Barneys in 2012 which reduced Barneys debt from 590M to 50M. Unfortunately the Pressman sons were not their father which set off the wave of private equity exchangement of hands so they did not go bankrupt.

It was sad to watch the decline of Barneys, and now an end of an era as this space was the OG. The first store was the coolest. Fred Pressman understood understated luxury with top hospitality like no other. The co-op was genius, which sold young designers sourced across the globe for a younger customer who might only saunter up those magnificent stairs with more expensive luxury items on occasion making them Barneys customers for life. That was at its peak, and the rest was a slow train wreck. You need the visionary not the private equity people to make a brand the brand.

The store has been sitting empty since the 2019. It is a stain on the neighborhood having an entire block of retail space sit empty. As more empty locations evolve into housing, we will all be better off. I am thrilled to see that there will be rent-stabilized and affordable housing incorporated into the building. There will be more to come, perhaps Macys or Saks? Building them into mixed-use housing is what our city needs. The next generation of retail in NYC is not inside a 3 acre property that Macys sits on.