Another Game Changer!
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/fa...l?ref=nyregion
It took 107 years, but Neiman Marcus is moving to Manhattan.
The Dallas-based company is opening a 250,000-square-foot store in Hudson Yards on the Far West Side in 2018. The lease was signed on Tuesday, said Karen Katz, the chief executive of Neiman Marcus Group.
“We needed to make sure that if we were taking this big, big step of coming to Manhattan, that we had a store that was going to be very impressive,” she said, speaking by phone from her Dallas office.
The store, which will be the centerpiece of a new retail complex by Related Companies, the developer of the Hudson Yards project, will be between 31st and 32nd Streets on 10th Avenue. Neiman Marcus will have prominent signage on the facade of the seven-story building, and will occupy space on floors five through seven. It will be allotted more than 80,000 square feet per floor. It is the first retailer that Related has announced for Hudson Yards.
“This entire project has been bespoke-tailored around Neiman Marcus,” said Kenneth Himmel, the executive at Related who is in charge of the retail and leasing at Hudson Yards.
“This is a game changer for Hudson Yards, for the West Side of New York, for Manhattan,” he continued. “It’s not just an anchor tenant. It makes a statement for our project.”
Neiman Marcus’s move into Manhattan is the latest by a department store at a time when many players are expanding and spending freely to take advantage of what they describe as a growing luxury market. The president of Saks Fifth Avenue, Marigay McKee, has been given about $1 billion to spend on Saks’s stores throughout the country over the next few years, with a good portion of that dedicated to the flagship store in Midtown.
Neiman Marcus, which also owns Bergdorf Goodman, is giving that landmark store at 58th Street and Fifth Avenue a sizable renovation as well. The Bergdorf president, Joshua Schulman, called the floor-by-floor renovation, to be completed by 2020, an “ambitious capital plan.”
And why is all this money being spent right now?
“There are more affluent consumers in the market,” Ms. Katz said. “I think there’s been wealth created since the recession.”
She said that Bergdorf Goodman would continue to serve the “very top of luxury and fashion,” while the new West Side Neiman Marcus store would “appeal to a broader luxury and fashion customer.”
“The number of tourists coming through Hudson Yards and the population that will be moving to and living in the West Side of the city will continue to grow,” she said. “We’ll be serving those customers.”
Mr. Himmel said that the original plan for the retail complex (which will have about one million square feet in all, far more than the 330,000 square feet of retail space at Related’s Time Warner Center) was to have a six-floor building capped off with a movie theater and restaurants. Related then considered putting in a department store, and that’s when he reached out to Neiman Marcus.
“There are only a few names to call,” he said. “When we figured out that we’d like to see if we could fit a department store in here, they were the logical party to call.”
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Ms. Katz said that she was not in pursuit of a Manhattan store (“We were extremely well represented in the city,” she said, referring to Bergdorf Goodman), but after she heard from Mr. Himmel, she became intrigued by the West Side and “how Manhattan has changed in the last 10 or 11 years.” As of now, the Neiman Marcus store closest to Manhattan is the one in Paramus, N.J.
Talks began a year ago, and even though Neiman Marcus Group was sold for $6 billion while they were discussing the project, it didn’t affect the negotiations, both parties said.
“They’re extremely excited about this project with Hudson Yards and have been very, very supportive,” Ms. Katz said, referring to the new owners, Ares Management and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board. “From the minute we started talking to them about it, they were very encouraging for us to pursue this.”
By the time this opens, it will be the 43rd Neiman Marcus full-line store in the United States.
Neiman Marcus will hardly be alone when it moves to the West Side. Time Warner is to relocate its headquarters there by 2018. L’Oréal and Coach are likewise moving into office space in a 52-story tower at the corner of 30th Street and 10th Avenue. The Culture Shed, which will be on 30th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, is a prospective new home for New York Fashion Week.
New York Fashion Week, by the way, begins Thursday, and Neiman Marcus and Related are planning to host an invitation-only cocktail party on Friday evening overlooking the Hudson Yards construction site to celebrate the new marriage.
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