The Sad State of Underground Retail in New York City

At Columbus Circle, only one of the 40 shops that opened in its underground market eight years ago is still open today. At Fulton Center, the decade-old mall in a Lower Manhattan subway station is nearly vacant. In Midtown, empty storefronts line the Port Authority and Rockefeller Center stations.

The state of retail in New York City’s vast underground subway system is, in a word, bleak.

Nearly three-quarters of spaces in the transit network are empty, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a downward trend that began before the coronavirus pandemic but was exacerbated by it and the rise of remote and hybrid work.

For travelers, the empty storefronts have created a sense of unease and urban decay. Some doors have been locked with chains, their windows covered with for-lease signs. Others have discarded items like restaurant supplies strewed about. Homeless people have taken over empty corners of retail areas and sleep in stairwells.

For the authority, the surplus of space means a continuing decline in retail revenue at a time when the agency — which runs the country’s largest transit system of buses, subways and trains — recently lost a projected $1 billion in annual revenue with the abrupt cancellation of congestion pricing.

The state agency is trying to reimagine how to fill the vacant spaces, including with noncommercial solutions, like art displays and dedicated spaces for buskers.

For some of the owners of the now-closed shops, the empty spaces represent an unrealistic expectation of who was going to stop to shop in the middle of their commute.

Both former and current shop owners said they were drawn to the subway system because of the large number of riders who could become customers. Last year, roughly 3.6 million people rode the subway every weekday, a captive audience of potential shoppers to buy drinks and food as well as trinkets, gifts and clothing.

Leith Hill opened an organic food store, Ellary’s Greens, inside the Columbus Circle station in Manhattan in 2016.

Since Day 1, Ms. Hill said, Ellary’s Greens never made a profit, despite the station being one of the busiest in the city. The shop closed in 2017.

Riders “are not there to pick up a chicken,” Ms. Hill said. “They are running through the station to get home.”

Subterranean retailers and newsstands once thrived and were nearly as ubiquitous as the subway cars themselves. Nedick’s served orange drinks and hot dogs. Tycoon Luncheonette slung coffee under Times Square 24 hours a day. Starting in 1904, Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant shucked oysters — and still does — inside Grand Central Terminal.

“It was phenomenal,” said Biana Todorovic, who co-owned Tiecoon, a tie and gifts retailer that had a store for two decades inside Pennsylvania Station and for several years inside Grand Central Terminal before closing during the pandemic. “Each year, we performed better than the year before, but I knew it would plateau at some point.”

Shops in transit stations took off overseas as well, with large malls and retailers selling sushi, sweaters and snacks to riders in London and Tokyo. They remain popular today.

By the 1980s, there were roughly 350 stores, kiosks and concessions operated by the transit authority. More were built in recent years, including a four-story mall atop the Fulton Street station when it was renovated for $1.4 billion in 2014.

Retail owners, especially those not selling food or drink, said rider habits started to change over the past 10 to 15 years. Shoppers started to snap photos of items and say they would just order them on Amazon, they said.

More recently, remote and hybrid work dealt another blow, Ms. Todorovic said. There are fewer people commuting to work every day.

For years, she stocked items in Tiecoon that interested repeat customers, like one man who shopped twice a month for gifts before he flew to Germany for work.

“He doesn’t have to physically be in Germany anymore,” she said. “They just get on Zoom meetings.”

Now, there are 195 retail spots, most of them clustered in the subway’s busiest and largest stations. Yet, only 54 are open, the authority said, while another 18 are under construction and 31 are in lease negotiations. The authority collected nearly $53 million in retail revenue in 2023, down from $72 million in 2019, it said.

Many lease proposals for tenants were dashed when the pandemic hit in early 2020, said David Florio, the authority’s chief real estate transactions and operations officer. To keep some stores open, the authority has offered reduced rent for retailers, which will be phased out over the coming years.

“We are trying to claw our way back,” Mr. Florio said.

Marshal Cohen, a retail industry analyst at Circana, a market research firm, said shoppers today looked for convenience and good deals, and there was rarely anything convenient or cheap in a subway station.

“In the world of the New York City subway system, show me one person killing a lot of time,” Mr. Cohen said. “Am I going to stop in the middle of my commute to try on a $200 pair of sunglasses?”

Three days a week, Ingrid Abramovitch walks through the Turnstyle Underground Market between the Columbus Circle subway stop and stairs to her office building, Hearst Tower. She said the last time she recalled stopping to buy something was at a wine shop that closed early in the pandemic.

“At the beginning, it was so nice,” said Ms. Abramovitch, the executive editor at Elle Decor, about the market. “But who wants to eat in a windowless area?”

Louis Termini had thought people would stop for pizza.

Mr. Termini, who owns Ignazio’s, a pizzeria in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn, said he was persuaded to open inside the Columbus Circle station after being told that 80,000 passengers might walk by his restaurant every day.

He opened in 2018 at the opposite end of two marquee stores: a Starbucks and a Dylan’s Candy Bar, both near the station’s turnstiles.

Both have since closed, as has Mr. Termini’s pizza shop, which lasted three months. He said he lost $300,000 and was so frustrated with the lack of business that he left behind everything, including pizza ovens. Rent, he said, was not affordable either — about $13,000 a month.

“All the foot traffic went up the stairs and out of the station,” Mr. Termini said.

Today, transit authority officials say they want to replenish storefronts with more food and drink options, especially grab-and-go kiosks in subway passageways, mezzanines and even on platforms.

In a way, the direction is a reversal to when the M.T.A. removed many food and drink retailers in the 1980s to clean up stations. The authority is investing in utility upgrades like water and power in its century-old stations to accommodate shops.

It is also seeking a vendor to develop and manage a large retail corridor in Grand Central Madison, the commuter rail terminal for the Long Island Rail Road that opened last year. The M.T.A. has outsourced similar retail areas elsewhere, including at the recently redeveloped L.I.R.R. concourse at Penn Station.

But the M.T.A. acknowledges there is no quick or easy solution. That is why it is looking at entirely different uses for empty storefronts. A “busking station” for musicians recently opened next to an underground platform on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In Midtown, a newsstand has been made into a living art space with plants.

“Instead of seeing an empty space, you’re being uplifted,” said Sandra Bloodworth, the director of the M.T.A.’s Arts & Design department.

Some retail owners in the New York City subway system still believe there will be a turnaround. Evan Feldman opened a location of his doughnut shop, Doughnuttery, in Columbus Circle in 2018, the only original shop still operating.

Mr. Feldman said that the transit authority had reduced his rent at the store, and that he’d expanded his business by fulfilling catering orders to nearby office buildings and accepting delivery orders online. The underground market is under new management, which has brought in additional security guards and moved out homeless people who had started to sleep in the stairwells.

“We are not going strong, but we still are making a go at it,” Mr. Feldman said. “We are a little resilient.”