In its 29 years in business, the Starbucks on Astor Place somehow became the second-oldest storefront on the street. It outlasted the Kmart, the Gap, the Walgreens, the Barnes & Noble, the David Barton Gym, the Vitamin Shoppe, the shawarma guy at the corner of St. Marks Place, even the Cooper Union’s engineering building. Only Astor Hair, rescued from closure in 2020 by Howard Wolfson and a few affluent friends, has been around longer. Now the Starbucks is gone. According to EV Grieve, which reported the closure yesterday, employees of the store said the rent was about to spike. A Starbucks spokesperson declined to go into detail about the decision, saying only that “we continually evaluate our store portfolio, using various criteria to ensure we are meeting the needs of our customers.” The store opened on March 30, 1995; many New York City commercial leases run for 30 years with rent bumps at each decade, suggesting that it may have been faced with a big increase next spring. (Update, 3:52 p.m.: A representative of ASG Group, the building’s owners, offered this statement: “We are sad they chose to leave, even as we offered a lease extension that would have allowed them to remain in their existing space at the exact same rent.”)
In 1995, its arrival seemed like a nail in the coffin of the grubby old East Village. It replaced the Riviera, the open-24-hours sibling to a West Village café that is now also gone. The Gap had arrived on Second Avenue a few years earlier; Kmart would be here soon. The Borg of coffeehouses had descended, and its greenhouselike enclosed sidewalk café made it and its customers especially visible. Yet it was a gentrifier that the neighborhood grew to accept pretty quickly. Its product was expensive for coffee but also better than the usual diner backwash, and it found its audience in a million NYU-freshman-year study dates. It was also (I can tell you firsthand) a pleasant spot in which to read a fresh copy of The Village Voice, often Wednesday’s edition bought at the Astor Place newsstand on Tuesday night and hurriedly mined for apartment listings. A second Starbucks eventually opened a few hundred feet away, and a third operated inside the Barnes & Noble across the street, nearly bringing this Onion headline to life.
All those activities were part of the foundational Starbucks concept of a “third place” — neither home nor office, a daytime gathering place for meetings and social contact that isn’t a bar. Although you still see people typing away on laptops in any given coffee place, that third-place idea is far less central to the Starbucks business model than it once was. Today’s caffè latte experience, especially if you’re outside a walkable city, is more like a fast-food one: grab and go, often via a drive-through. (Younger customers may be startled to learn that it was once commonplace to order your Starbucks coffee in a ceramic cup to stay. Some stores will still serve you that way, but who asks for it?) The Astor Place Starbucks, its 4,000 square feet still filled with students and camped-out East Village characters, once the advance guard of the New New York, had become the old-timer that didn’t align with the neighborhood’s habits anymore. If you just want coffee and aren’t going to park yourself, you can go to a lot of places and do so within 50 paces of this store — to the Astor Plate kiosk in front of Cooper Union, for example, or the gleaming aluminum Madman Espresso trailer across the plaza, or the quilted-stainless-steel coffee-and-doughnuts cart directly in front of the Starbucks itself.
That cart is owned and operated by an extroverted Egyptian guy named Ahmad Elsaid, whose coffee is pretty good, too. “Look around,” he says, gesturing up and down the street, pointing out the departed chains — the Gap, the Walgreens, all the rest. “You don’t need them when you can buy anything on your phone.” That obviously isn’t what drove Starbucks out, but Elsaid tells me that he’s heard that this location “has been losing money for ten years.” (Could be true, could be rumor; Starbucks will not discuss the financials.) “Everything’s different since the pandemic,” he says. Salma, the young woman who works with him in the cart, suggests that the boycott may have dinged Starbucks’ business among NYU students. Elsaid says his business is fine — “It goes up, it goes down. I’m okay” — but about the closure right in front of him, he says what everyone knows: The rent is too damn high. “If Starbucks can’t pay it,” he says, his voice intensifying, “who can?”