In June, a development committee for the Town of Catskill, in Greene County, posted an elaborate YouTube video to lure "an experienced chef-restaurateur with a taste for adventure" to its main street, offering a prime storefront rent-free for a year.
Hoboken's boomtown status has driven Washington Street storefront rents to exorbitant heights, tripling in many cases.
Still, storefront rents could run as high as $200 to $250 a square foot, she said, prices that are daunting to many small merchants and restaurateurs.
Storefront rents in the area, which attracts tourists and well-heeled shoppers, have soared to more than $600 a square foot, or double what retailers are paying in Times Square.
The businesses on the site are mostly run out of crumbling storefronts rented by immigrants.
Indeed, even though boutiques, bars and restaurants now crowd a neighborhood once filled with men sleeping on sidewalk grates and storefronts rented by artists, 9 Bleecker endures as a countercultural haven and gathering place.
He predicted the storefront would rent for around $250 a square foot annually on the ground floor.
A two-bedroom over a storefront there rents for about $2,000 a month, said Kathleen Travers, an agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman in Southold.
THREE years ago, Salvatore Arcidiacono, a commercial real estate broker and property owner in Pleasantville, had 20 empty storefronts for rent in the economically struggling downtown area of the village.
When this group of artists found each other, they began gathering on the Lower East Side at Alleged Gallery, a 2,000-square-foot 2,000-square-foot 2,000-square-footonth.
At first they found empty storefronts or rented a gallery.
