Depression Modern meets Recession Modern. Over the weekend we walked down one of our favorite streets and saw a shocking sight - one that we expect we'll see more of in the next 12 months - a totally empty storefront where Michael Smith's Depression Modern used to be. After 30 years of fevered Saturday sales and many, many fans, this Soho staple just vanished overnight. More pics below....
As the sign below says, Michael's sister store, Adelaide, is still open. This is one sweet store front for someone!
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Comments (11)
Oh no...Let's pray the replacement will be Starbucks or Pinkberry
sorry for got to add "not" between will and be
I don't know whether I'm proud or embarassed to say I remember when depression moderne opened. Loved browsing through its finds. Shall miss it greatly.
Thirty years in retail is remarkable for any store. This isn't the first economic downturn these proprietors have experienced. You should swing by the sister store and find out why they closed this location.
The proposed rent was raised from $7000 to $14,000.No small business will be able to meet this price.
14k a month for that block??? insane...
That's not surprising. A very well regarded design store in West Hollywood recently purchased a new location not to far from where they were because the landlord tripled the rent. They had been in this location for nearly 20 years.
The same crap happened in San Francisco during the dot com boom. Then the bust hit, the landlards weren't able to fill the now vacant spaces, and started to WHINE about how they couldn't make any money.
Well, if you hadn't evicted your paying tenants, idiots . . .
My rent went up 75% about a year ago right before everything started to fall apart when a real estate agent got involved, now all Im going is paying rent. Forget about taking home any money. We are loosing a business a week here in Santa Barbara.
Landlords are going to see a comeuppance in this environment and for good reason. They're raising rents, causing businesses to close, but in this environment, they'll get nothing. I can't imagine who would rent that space for $14K a month. Good luck to the landlord, but he just made a really really dumb move. After RMBS, CMBS will be the next shoe to fall and commercial lease landlords are going to feel some serious, serious pain.
This is obscene. I loved Depression Modern. A beautiful, unique store. A greedy landlord, Friedland Properties, drove one of the best video stores in NYC, TLA Video, out of their 8th Street lcoation -- and NY entirely - when it raised the rent some years ago. That storefront is STILL vacant after almost 3 years. When does this end?