A survey of Canal Street’s changing landscape

Canal Street should be one of New York City’s greatest thoroughfares. It’s lined with a pleasant mix of unique buildings; it passes through several thriving neighborhoods and historic districts; and it houses dozens of small mom-and-pop businesses, many of which have been there for more than 50 years.

Instead, Canal Street is currently one of the city’s worst commercial streetscapes, blighted by empty storefronts and an array of increasingly generic new buildings. A walk along its entire 1.4 mile stretch, which runs 26 blocks from West Street to East Broadway, reveals a grand boulevard in crisis, with its street life choked out by real estate speculators, and traffic so bad that transit advocates have taken to calling it “Manhattan’s Boulevard of Death.”

Every single block of Canal Street is now undergoing some change to its individual character, be it a new tower rising, a decades-old old business closing down, or an empty shop rotting away. In one four-block stretch between Broadway and West Broadway, there are no less than 31 empty storefronts, some of which have been vacant for at least five years. In another six-block stretch, between Sixth Avenue and West Street, just five street-level businesses exist.

All of this can make you wonder, how has the city let such a vital artery become so corroded?

The answer is as complicated as Canal Street’s tangled identity. At its western end, the wealthy residents of Tribeca and Hudson Square have purposefully chosen to live along a desolate streetscape lined by walls of glass and concrete. At its eastern end, waves of hipsters have slowly found a foothold in the Lower East Side for new bars and restaurants. And in its middle section, where it runs through Soho, Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Bowery, real estate investors have spent the past decade trying to forcibly change the identity of the street.

“Property owners are betting that Canal Street, long a mishmash of counterfeit handbag stores and small-electronics purveyors, is on the cusp of a real estate transformation,” wrote The Real Deal back in 2012. “The landlords are preparing for a cultural shift in the street, emptying old tenants and looking for new ones.”

In the past few years, hundreds of million of dollars have been invested along this central section of Canal Street, buying up old buildings and emptying them out, as a handful of landlords wait for retailers willing to pay their exorbitant rents.

The results have brought this once-bustling corridor to its knees, with dozens of small businesses driven out and dozens of shuttered storefronts, leaving behind an atrophied landscape for the millions of pedestrians who pass by every day. As Canal Street waits for its future to be decided, it sits in limbo, in an uncertain moment of transition.

553 Canal Street: The Spring Street Salt Shed marks the western end of Canal Street, where it meets West Street. This monolithic concrete structure, a $20 million Sanitation Department building, was designed by Dattner Architects and completed in 2015. Praised as The Sydney Opera House of salt sheds, the building is eye-catching from a distance; up close, it has placed a 69-foot-high concrete wall along the sidewalk, creating an unfriendly pedestrian landscape.

538-542 Canal Street, aka 290 West Street: At the opposite intersection of Canal and West Street sits an anonymous 11-story glass tower, which also opened in 2015. Designed by Adjmi & Andreoli, this luxury apartment complex has no retail space on the ground floor, leaving pedestrians to face a generic wall of glass.

502-510 Canal Street: A number of other luxury apartment buildings now loom over this end of Canal Street, lining the sidewalk with blank walls. 471 Washington, at the corner of Canal and Washington Street, was designed by Ben Hansen Architect, and “is filled with rich young millionaires” that “like to stay under the radar,” according to the New York Times.

486-500 Canal, aka 475 Greenwich: The Zinc Building, which debuted in 2007, was one of the earliest of the luxury apartment complexes along Canal Street, where northern Tribeca has slowly been transforming into a “quiet enclave” for rich residents seeking a neighborhood with restricted nightlife, according to The Real Deal. The ground floor commercial spaces are almost completely empty, except for a nail salon. With a dearth of shops, cafes, bars and restaurants, the sidewalks here are empty, too.

499 Canal Street: Each of these shops has minimal signage and street presence. Cryofuel, a cryotherapy spa with infrared saunas that opened in 2017, sits almost unmarked between a wing of the Arlo Soho Hotel, a boutique hotel with micro guest rooms, and Polo Electric, an electrical contractor founded in 1975. Like their neighbors in Tribeca, the residents of Hudson Square have been ”fighting to keep it quiet,” but “places to buy groceries are still scarce,” according to the New York Times.

472-484 Canal Street, aka 205 Hudson Street: One of the largest property owners along Canal Street is Trinity Church, which was granted 215 acres of land here by Queen Anne in 1705. Trinity is now actively redeveloping its multiple properties in Hudson Square, yet most of the church-owned commercial storefronts along Canal Street remain empty.

431-475 Canal Street, aka 1 Hudson Square: This long stretch of empty storefronts between Varick Street and Hudson Street is slated to become the Jackie Robinson Museum. The groundbreaking was held in April 2017, but the museum is not scheduled to open until 2019.

417-423 Canal Street: For over a decade, a large empty lot between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue has sat empty, waiting for Trinity to develop it. The church demolished the buildings here in 2007, and has populated the site with a variety of pop-up businesses ever since. There are no proposals for the space on Trinity’s website, although it is noted that “Trinity thinks about the future of Hudson Square in decades and centuries.”

381-387 Canal Street: Located just outside Trinity’s plans for Hudson Square, the first clusters of small businesses appear along Canal between Thompson Street and West Broadway. These include Canal Alarms, which has been in business since 1941.

391 Canal Street: Unfortunately, many of the storefronts along the five block stretch of Canal between Thompson Street and Broadway have emptied. Argo Electronics, described by Vanishing New York as “a beautiful little remnant of old Canal,” closed in October 2017 after a run of over 37 years.

357-361 Canal Street: Most of the empty storefronts along this section of Canal Street have been created by real estate speculators, who have been buying up property since at least 2012, in hopes of gentrifying the area and driving up rents. These three buildings are all owned by United American Land, and the storefronts have been empty since at least 2013. UAL is one of the other largest property holders along Canal Street; it owns approximately ten buildings, almost all with empty storefronts.

351 Canal Street: Sold in 2013 for $24.75 million, this building is still undergoing a renovation. “There are a lot of people banking right now that Canal is going to be the next big shopping corridor,” the building’s financier told Racked in 2014. So far, their dream of “major retailers” moving to Canal has not yet materialized.

345 Canal Street: Just a handful of the scrappy independent businesses that once made this section of Canal Street a destination have managed to hold out. Canal Plastics, in business for over 50 years, is the only shop still open on its block, between Wooster and Greene streets.

341 Canal Street, aka 11 Greene Street: After almost 10 years of delays, work is now underway on a six story mixed use building here at the corner of Canal and Greene. Designed by Gene Kaufman, the building struggled since 2007 from challenges by the Landmarks Commission.

329 Canal Street, aka 6 Greene Street: Like Canal Plastics, Canal Rubber has had a long run, opening for business in 1954. Unfortunately, the building that houses it was sold for $24 million in 2015, leaving its future uncertain. For now, the business has told Vanishing New York: “We’re not going anywhere.”

325-327 Canal Street: Canal Rubber’s immediate neighbors have all been cleared out by real estate speculators. These two buildings are also owned by United American Land, which purchased them in 2016 for $12 million.

312-322 Canal Street: This January, the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved plans to build a seven-story residential building at this site, designed by Paul A. Castrucci Architects, after seven years of delays.

304-310 Canal Street: When Pearl Paint closed in 2014, some considered it the final nail in the coffin for this section of Canal Street. The business had been open since 1933, and is now being turned into two luxury residential properties. 304-306 Canal is currently being marketed by Vornado, while the proposals for 308 and 310 Canal were approved by the Landmarks Commission in April 2017.

301 Canal Street: At Canal and Broadway, another empty storefront is owned by United American Land, which purchased the building in 2017 for $5.4 million.

296 Canal Street, aka 415 Broadway: The National City Bank Building, a New York City Landmark and the predecessor to today’s Citibank, is today just another boarded up property owned by United American Land. A Walgreens/Duane Reade branch failed to make a go of it here over the past two years, leaving the building empty yet again.

272-274 Canal Street: Currently for sale by Cushman and Wakefield for $10.25 million, these two tenements at Canal and Cortlandt Alley have been emptied out, leaving behind a barren streetscape.

257-259 Canal Street: Two businesses from the increasingly endangered “old” Canal Street, of handbags and watches, tourist tchotchkes, and t-shirts. Despite the efforts of real estate speculators and police crackdowns, for many visitors, this will always be the main lure of Canal Street.

247 Canal Street: The Little Chinatown shopping mall at Canal and Lafayette is shuttered, and its spaces are up for lease. Police crackdowns and lawsuits from handbag companies have increasingly forced out the many small businesses on Canal Street that sold counterfeit handbags, watches, and jewelry. A 2010 article about a police raid here describes the mall as having 27 booths and conditions that were “perilous to life.”

246-250 Canal Street: The Phoenix Mall, located just across the street from Little Chinatown, has also been shuttered, driving out a half-dozen small businesses. Renderings online show a two-story glass box taking its place. One of the casualties was the Excellent Dumpling House, in business since 1983, which closed in 2017.

235 Canal Street: The streetscape of Canal Street between Lafayette and Bowery is mostly unprotected by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, and is increasingly being turned into glass boxes, as more and more bank branches move in. This HSBC bank building opened at Canal and Centre Street in 2009.

184-194 Canal Street, aka 83 Mott Street: Standing in stark contrast to these newer glass towers is the On Leong Tong building, one of the best examples of “Chinese Modernism” along Canal Street. Located at the corner of Mott and Canal, it was built in 1950, and designed by Poy Gum Lee, who grew up nearby. This historic building is not currently a NYC landmark, though its history was featured by the Museum of the Chinese in America in 2016.

203-211 Canal Street: The central section of Canal Street has some lively streetscapes remaining, especially between Baxter and Mulberry, where a thriving row of jewelry stores has taken root.

213-217 Canal Street: Unfortunately, even these stores are at risk of being displaced by new development. In 2014, an eight-story office building was proposed for this site, also located between Baxter and Mulberry.

159-165 Canal Street, aka 38 Elizabeth Street: Another example of the glassy carbuncles that are now rising along Canal Street. This two story box took out six ground-floor retail tenants. When sold in 2013, the property set a record-breaking price for the street.

150 Canal Street, aka 58 Bowery: The Citizens Savings Bank building at the corner of Bowery and Canal is a NYC landmark dating back to the 1920s. It is now overshadowed by the new glass tower behind it, housing Hotel 50 Bowery, which opened in 2017.

Along the eastern end of Canal Street, between Forsyth and East Broadway, the traffic is calmer and the streetscape is largely a collection of small independent stores and restaurants. However, numerous empty storefronts can still be found.

89-93 Canal Street: Between Forsyth and Eldridge, another good array of old architecture and small shops. The creeping gentrification from the Lower East Side has not yet gained a foothold here. But some small businesses are still being forced out by rent increases: Cup and Saucer, a 1940s luncheonette on the corner of Canal and Eldridge, closed in 2017, after the building’s owners imposed a 93% rent increase.

86-94 Canal Street: Directly across the street, a much different neighborhood landscape has been created. This new 12 story building with 32 residential units was built by Andy Chau’s Wing Fung Realty Group in 2016. The storefronts of this new building are currently empty, leaving behind a stagnant streetscape.

80-84 Canal Street: Along the south side of Canal between Eldridge and Allen, on a block sandwiched between Andy Chau’s new tower and the incoming Jarmulowsky Bank Building hotel, almost every storefront has been emptied out, including a jewelry shop, an internet cafe, and a bus station.

54 Canal Street: The Jarmulowsky Bank Building, purchased in 2011 by DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners for $33 million, is continuing along in its transformation into a upscale hotel.

53 Canal Street: The Alexander Olch boutique on the corner of Orchard Street, which opened in 2015, marks the westernmost advance of gentrification along this stretch of Canal Street. To its east, the block between Orchard and Ludlow also houses a tattoo parlor, a skate shop, the “hipster hangout” Dimes, and Cervo’s, an offshoot of a Bed-Stuy restaurant.

43 Canal Street: Cervo’s replaces the short-lived outpost of Pies n’ Thighs, another restaurant which originated in Brooklyn. Cervo’s was a recently New York Times critics pick, in a review that traced its roots back to “smallish Brooklyn places with locavore inclinations.”

The classic architecture of this block, between Orchard and Ludlow streets, has so far been relatively untouched by developers, although most of this stretch is not protected by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Bondy Export Corp, which specializes in 220 volt appliances, has been in business here since 1953.

28 Canal Street: Anchoring the eastern end of Canal Street is an increasingly rare neighborhood staple: a corner market that somehow manages to hold out, while offering up $1 hot coffee. It is one of the only grocery stores along the street’s entire 26-block length.

Nathan Kensinger is a photographer, filmmaker, and curator who has been documenting New York City’s abandoned edges, endangered neighborhoods, and post-industrial waterfront for more than a decade. His Camera Obscura photo essays have appeared on Curbed since 2012. His photographs have been exhibited by the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the NYC Parks Department, and inside the Atlantic Ave-Barclays Center subway station.