Fifth Avenue’s prime retail strip is doing just fine, and given the state of many New York streetscapes, that itself is news. Post-pandemic recovery in what might be called the Tiffany’s district has been real, boosted by ultraexpensive residential development, like the conversion of the Crown Building to the Aman. At 570 Fifth, on the corner of West 46th Street, a new tower will soon rise to replace an array of dowdy prewar holdouts. It’ll mostly be a million square feet of offices, but the 80,000-square-foot ground-floor retail space will be none other than Ikea. Per Bloomberg News, the Dutch holding company behind most of Ikea’s franchised stores (known as Ingka after the company’s problematic Swedish founder) will own a third of the tower plus the Ikea space, and the New York developer Extell will own the rest. It’ll open in 2028.
Theoretically, it makes sense for Ikea to make some of its retail stores, like the Billy bookcase, smaller. (The stores in Red Hook and Elizabeth are north of 350,000 square feet; this one, of course, will be 80,000.) People like Ikea for everyday products as well as big decennial purchases. One can certainly imagine dropping in to buy, say, a colander or a desk lamp between schleps out to Red Hook for a crib or a sofa. It’s worked for Ikea in other cities and makes extra sense here because comparatively few New Yorkers drive. The store’s being called a Meeting Point, presumably because you can make an appointment there to talk through your new kitchen.
Yet it’s a retail model that, twice now in New York, has looked good for a while and then fallen apart. In 1995, the company opened a mini-Ikea at 135 East 57th Street to lots of attention. At the time, the New Jersey store was comparatively new, giving every visit the vibe of boarding a mysterious Scandinavian spaceship, and Red Hook was still a neighborhood of ungentrified dive bars and battered warehouses. This 57th Street store was far, far smaller than the one in Elizabeth, at 7,400 square feet, and it functioned as a showroom for the full Ikea experience. It was perceived, at the time, as a downscaling of the district, partly because the building had formerly housed the posh menswear store Louis Boston. It was gone within a couple of years, perhaps because it didn’t stock enough stuff in its limited space. For anything of size, you placed your order and it was shipped to you. Before we all got habituated to Amazon, that was less than ideal.
Ikea tried this move again in 2019, this time at 999 Third Avenue, at the beginning of its current push toward smaller stores. This one was 17,000 square feet in size, and it carried the label Ikea Planning Studio, the idea being that (as with the forthcoming Meeting Point model) professionals would lend a hand with stuff like kitchen-cabinet and closet-storage designs. Hard to say if it flopped, or was closed in anticipation of this new space that’s been announced today, or if, well, 2020 happened. But it, too, closed after barely three years, and a similar store in Rego Park came and went even more quickly. You can’t help wondering whether, for some New Yorkers, the overwhelming scale of the megastores is part of the point; a daylong LARP immersion in the catalogue, whether or not you have the space in your apartment for any of what you see.
