Manhattan’s iconic Fifth Avenue strip that attracts throngs of holiday revelers to the annual Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and luxury shops’ holiday window displays will go car free for the first time in half a century.
The stretch from 48th Street to 57th Street will be closed on three Sundays, Dec. 4, 11 and 18, from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., New York Mayor Eric Adams’ office said in a statement Tuesday. The closings are part of the city’s moves to “cement Midtown Manhattan as the premiere international holiday destination” and open 11 city blocks to pedestrians in December — the city’s largest-ever holiday season-specific “Open Street,” according to the mayor’s office.
The portion of Fifth Avenue between 49th and 60th streets is the most expensive retail corridor in Manhattan, according to the brokerage Cushman & Wakefield.
The “overwhelmingly popular pedestrianized area around Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall throughout the holiday season” also will return, the mayor’s office said. The city also is unveiling two marketing campaigns to ask people to shop at small businesses in midtown and across the city.
“Fifth Avenue is the heart of New York City, welcoming over 10 million people during the holiday season alone,” Ed Hogan, board chairman of the area’s business improvement group, the Fifth Avenue Association, said in the statement. “Visitors from all over the world come to Fifth Avenue to shop the most iconic shopping street in the world and take in the city’s finest cultural institutions including MOMA, St. Patrick’s, and Central Park.”
A recent study released by the New York City Department of Transportation found that hospitality industry businesses on streets that are closed to car traffic outperformed those on nearby streets that had car traffic over the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Most New York restaurants said recently they want to keep pandemic-driven outdoor dining permanent.
The move comes as Manhattan’s retail market is still trying to recover from the pandemic-driven closings and other disruptions. Third-quarter average asking rents for ground-floor retail space in Manhattan remained far below peak levels and has dropped an average of 10.2% since the third quarter of 2020, according to a Cushman report.
The Fifth Avenue strip between 49th and 60th streets posted an 8.2% year-over-year decline to $2,510 per square foot among direct retail space, in contrast to gains seen in neighborhoods including SoHo, Flatiron and Union Square West, Cushman said.
Still, amid returns of international tourists and more workers back in the office, third-quarter Manhattan availability rates declined in 10 of 11 markets that Cushman tracked, including a decline to 10.1% from 13% among direct retail space on Fifth Avenue.