Goodbye, Chain Drugstores. Hello, Golf Simulators.
The New York Times
New York’s retail landscape is changing. But it’s not cheese shops or butchers that are taking over those vacant neighborhood storefronts.
Over the past year or so, the commercial real estate industry has made it very easy for me to satisfy an urge I am not sure I will ever have. Within a six- or seven-minute walk from my apartment in Brooklyn, it is now possible to get to two indoor golf simulators — places where the purpose is to successfully whack a ball into a 10-ft screen that delivers digital replicas of famous golf courses and a soul-crushing lineup of metrics about the reach, speed and accuracy of any particular swing.
A walk a bit farther to the east, another half-mile or so, would land me at Golfzon Social, which, in addition to virtual golf, offers Tater Tots with bacon and a five-grain pilaf. Golfzon sits on the ground floor of 11 Hoyt, the Jeanne Gang-designed luxury condominium building that is around the corner from a city social-services agency that distributes EBT cards. If that disconnect proved too jarring, 15 minutes on a CitiBike would get me to the Gowanus Golf Club, opened in August by a 28-year-old Princeton University water-polo champion turned management consultant.
Indoor golf facilities have proliferated in the city during the past few years, in part because the pandemic boosted interest in golf generally. In 2023, according to the National Golf Foundation, a record 3.4 million people played on a golf course for the first time. In New York, the pandemic also left us with so much vacant office and retail space that has been hard to fill. Golf v. 2 on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights used to be a Mattress Firm.
Late in 2020, a local community group, the Brooklyn Heights Association, conducted a survey to determine what sort of stores people in the neighborhood most wanted to see in the empty spaces that were a problem even before the pandemic. When the people spoke, they said they wanted a specialty food shop, a fish store, a butcher. None of those materialized. Purveyors of farmstead cheeses, wild salmon and other staples of the bourgeois dinner table could not manage the rents. The dream of a small-scale food hall in a building previously occupied by an Ann Taylor Loft died when it was announced that a private-equity-backed veterinary chain was moving in.
A Covid test site which had been a candy store eventually became a med spa, the second on the street, the fast food equivalent of cosmetic dermatology. A few blocks away is a branch of Peachy, which bills itself as a dispenser of “preventative Botox.” After several rounds of venture-capital funding, Peachy now has eight locations in the city.
The leader of golf-simulator chains, Five Iron, does not have a Brooklyn operation yet, but it is looking for one. Across the country, there are 32 Five Iron locations with six in New York; a seventh, in Rockefeller Center, will open early next year. On Monday afternoon, I paid a visit to the outpost in Herald Square. It had been open since 2021, and at 2 p.m., it was totally full, with nearly every tee occupied by a man between roughly 25 and 60 and a soundtrack — Billy Joel, Christopher Cross — that seemed indifferent to the generational range. One player told me that he came several times a week, a pattern that his wife preferred to his giving over an entire Saturday to 18 holes played, anachronistically, outside.
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