LowBrow-The Next New Neighborhood
By Steve Rappaport
Broadway between 33 to 23 streets is an emerging area that deserves the attention of forward thinking restaurateurs and retailers. It is a hodgepodge strip with no charm and plenty of low end mercantile activity. This is exactly the type of counterintuitive neighborhood, disdained and avoided, that Soho, Meatpacking, and Williamsburg once were. It has an interesting mix of buildings presenting a variety of opportunity. I call it LowBrow, a fittingly ironic name. Development has started, as noted in the link below. Nightlife, always the precursor to other growth, is already there to some degree. However the neighborhood is still in the first iterations of change. Therefore the risk/reward ratio resonates.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/realestate/14streets.html?ref=real-estate
