Rite Aid To Shutter Last Three Manhattan Stores Amid Bankruptcy Saga
The pharmacy giant filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May, and is in the process of closing all of its remaining locations statewide. Its final three Manhattan stores–on First Avenue, Hudson Street, and Broadway–will shutter on June 4.
As of June 4, Rite Aid is closing all 33 of its NYC stores, including the three remaining ones in Manhattan: located at 81 First Ave., 534 Hudson St., and 4046 Broadway.
The closings come after the pharmacy giant filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 5. Rite Aid is now in the process of shuttering 316 stores nationwide, including all 178 in New York State. Earlier, in October 2023, the company had filed for Chapter 11 to address a heavy debt load, leading to the closing of over 100 additional stores, including four in Manhattan; these were located at 195 Eighth Ave., 1033 St. Nicholas Ave., and 4188 Broadway.
The final rollback of Rite Aid’s Manhattan portfolio was first reported by Crain’s New York Business. Sixty union workers will lose their jobs due to the Manhattan closings, out of a total of 516 job losses, according to WARN notices filed with the NYS Department of Labor. Rite Aid leased the spaces for the three sites, and an auction of their leases will be held soon by a bankruptcy court.
The company has around $2 billion in debt, reportedly stemming from their contribution to the opioid epidemic. As of June 2023, they had $8.6 billion in debt. They had only just emerged from their initial bankruptcy filing last September, as well as hired a new CEO.
The lease for the 81 First Ave. store in the East Village, for which Rite Aid was paying $627,000 in annual rent, expires in 2032. The 1920s-era East Village building has been owned by the New Tandem Equities since 2007, city property records reveal, when it was sold to them for $4.2 million by an LLC under developer Anthony Marano’s control. Marano, in turn, had bought the building from grocery store mogul (Gristedes and D’Agostino’s) and radio station owner (WABC 770 AM) John Catsimatidis in 2005.
Rite Aid’s Hudson Street lease in the West Village, meanwhile, expires in 2029 and stands at $953,000 a year annually. The store sits on the ground floor of The Kimberly, a luxury condo development spearheaded by the brothers Irwin and Robert Stillman, which was constructed in 1999.
The space used to house the Dover Taxi Company, which was prominently featured in the 1970s show Taxi and run by George Cunningham; city records show that Cunningham and the Stillman brothers entered into a mutual indentured deed overseeing the site around the time of the opening of Rite Aid and the condo building; the agreement persists today.
The final Manhattan Rite Aid lease to be auctioned off, on Broadway, is located in Washington Heights and expires in 2028. As Crain’s reported, there are indeed no reliable publicly available city records on the site’s ownership, although the building housing the store was reportedly built in 1980.
The deadline for bids on the leases will be set by a bankruptcy court in Trenton, NJ. Marketing for the spaces will be handled by A&G Real Estate Partners. Other major pharmacy chains might not be likely replacements for the Rite Aid locations, as both CVS and Walgreens (which also owns Duane Reade), are in the midst of trimming back their portfolios nationwide; both Walgreens and CVS will be each shuttering one UES location on Lexington Avenue. Walgreen’s Duane Reade operation closed three Manhattan stores earlier this year.