Old Navy has inked the year’s largest retail lease at JEMB Realty’s Herald Towers, breathing new life into an increasingly stagnant Midtown shopping corridor.
Old Navy, Gap Inc.’s largest brand, will open a 55,000-square-foot flagship on the first and second floors at 50 West 34th Street, the landlord announced. The clothing retailer inked a 15-year lease at the 1 million-square-foot mixed-use building. JEMB declined to disclose the asking rent.
The brand will relocate from its nearby location at 150 West 34th Street to the building at the corner of 34th Street and Sixth Avenue next year. The new store will offer an “immersive, digitally led experience” that will include experiential and interactive components, Old Navy CEO Horacio Barbeito said in a statement. The deal was first reported by Bloomberg.
Gap Inc.’s real estate team and Newmark’s Ariel Schuster represented Old Navy in the deal. JEMB subsidiary LMJ Realty represented the landlord in-house.
The Gap brand once leased space in the 25-story building but in 2018 decided not to renew its lease. More recently, a Harry Potter exhibit and Samsung were short-term tenants. The landlord is still looking to fill 55,000 square feet of retail space in the building, which also includes 700 apartments.
Herald Square has seen a slower recovery than other Manhattan retail corridors like SoHo and prime Fifth Avenue. The area along 34th Street between Fifth and Seventh avenues had 21 ground-floor retail vacancies during the first quarter of the year, according to CBRE. That’s the second-most among the 16 districts the brokerage tracked.
Retail asking rents declined in the district by 8.1 percent from a year earlier to $455 per square foot.