Nordstrom Seeks Space for a Second Manhattan Store

NEW YORK, United States — Nordstrom Inc., the retailer planning to open its first New York City store on Midtown's West 57th Street, is seeking space in lower Manhattan for a second location, brokers from CBRE Group Inc. said.

Executives of the Seattle-based department store chain have approached landlords of South Street Seaport and 1 Wall St. “and maybe one or two others,” Richard Hodos, an executive vice president at CBRE, said today at a briefing for reporters on New York’s commercial real estate market.

“They’re looking,” Hodos said. “They’re negotiating economics with a couple of different developers at different sites. Contemporaneous to that, they are doing their area research.”

Luxury department-store chains have been adding Manhattan locations, reversing a trend in which merchants with large, diverse offerings had lost out to smaller specialty stores, CBRE retail executives said at the briefing. Saks Fifth Avenue agreed last month to anchor the retail portion of lower Manhattan’s Brookfield Place, and Neiman Marcus Group Ltd. said it would open its first New York store in the Hudson Yards development on Midtown’s far west side.

Nordstrom, the operator of more than 100 namesake department stores across the U.S., said in June that it would open its first full-line Manhattan location at 225 W. 57th St., at the base of a residential skyscraper to be built by Gary Barnett's Extell Development Co. Extell also developed the One57 condominium tower one block to the east.

Increased Tourism

Downtown, Nordstrom would be entering a retail market that’s benefiting from residential and commercial development and increased tourism tied to the opening of the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center site, according to CBRE.

Dan Evans, a Nordstrom spokesman in Seattle, said he had no immediate comment on plans for a lower Manhattan location. Women’s Wear Daily reported on Oct. 2 that the retailer is looking for a 250,000-square-foot (23,000-square-meter) space in the area.

Retail rents downtown climbed 37 percent since 2012 to about $130 a square foot on average, according to a report in May by the Real Estate Board of New York, a trade organization representing the city’s property industry.

Westfield Corp. is planning to open 350,000 square feet of stores next year at the trade center, and Brookfield Property Partners LP is in the midst of a $250 million makeover of the retail space at its Brookfield Place office complex. A dining terrace called Hudson Eats opened in June.

By David M. Levitt, with assistance from Lindsey Rupp; editors: Kara Wetzel, Christine Maurus, Daniel Taub.