Over a million square feet of retail space is empty in vacant chain-drugstore locations across New York City. Here’s why it’s so hard to fill.
An empty Duane Reade, steps from Wall Street, darkens a landmark office building.
A former Walgreens in a condo in Murray Hill has been closed for over seven years.
A boarded-up Rite Aid in Astoria has attracted a homeless encampment in its parking lot.
They’re all examples of the city’s living dead.
Scores of chain drugstores that once anchored shopping hubs across New York City remain shuttered even as much of the city’s storefront real estate has bounced back from the Covid-19 pandemic. Many could stay that way for years to come, because of ironclad leases, the difficulty of finding new tenants for the sprawling spaces and seismic shifts in the drugstore business, brokers and industry analysts said.
The result is over a million square feet of prime real estate collecting dust in some of the busiest commercial districts, according to a new analysis of the city’s pharmacy market. And critics say the stores have become neighborhood eyesores that attract illegal activity and detract from nearby businesses.
Now, business groups and elected officials are hoping to repurpose the spaces into things like microbreweries and arcades, thanks in part to recent zoning changes that allow for new uses.
Since the first quarter of 2020, before the pandemic, 222 big-box pharmacies have closed in New York City, and 138 stores were still vacant in July, according to Live XYZ, a mapping company that collects storefront data. The typical store ranges from 8,000 to 15,000 square feet, brokers said.
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