Downtown’s Florent and Barneys Have Sold to New Owners

Crain’s New York has sussed out that Iconiq Capital, the family-wealth-management firm of the Zuckerbergs and various other Silicon Valley entities, has bought the tiny building at 69 Gansevoort Street. That one-story structure was, as so many aging clubgoers and hangers-on will remember, home to Florent. Opened in 1985 as an inexpensive French bistro that served the local steaks to not only the local meatcutters but also the local clubgoers and sex workers, it very soon became an avatar among downtown-in-the-1980s places: trendy but not stupidly so, impeccably chic without being over- or underdressed, and open all night. The owner, Florent Morellet, left the former coffee-shop fixtures and the mid-century sign reading “R&L Restaurant” fundamentally unchanged, retaining the pluperfect degree of patina. (During the AIDS crisis, Morellet used to post his T-cell count above the counter. He made it through to the era of anti-viral drugs and is fortunately still with us.) Florent, the restaurant, stayed open until 2008, when the rent became unmanageable; the building sold a few years later for $8.6 million. Since then, a different restaurant under the old name, R&L, has opened and closed there and so has a Madewell store. The space has also spent long stretches unused, and (per Crain’s) this sale came after the most recent owner’s bankruptcy filing. Iconiq paid $9.3 million, through a shell company that did not entirely disguise its involvement. One hopes (pessimistically) that the new management won’t gut renovate and turn it into the usual pure white box. Don’t bet against it, though.

At the other end of the 1980s-chic spectrum, the retail condo at 101 Seventh Avenue — known to all yuppies, scum or otherwise, as Barneys New York — has also just changed hands. Crain’s (again) is reporting that Wolfe Landau, a Brooklyn developer, has bought the space that housed Barneys twice. Its first occupancy lasted decades, during the long evolution from Barney Pressman’s mid-century bargain mecca through to his grandson Gene’s far more fabulous vision. In the 1980s, that later version was the place for the upscale New Yorker to shop. It was the store that launched the Armani-suit years, architecturally distinguished in part by a winding staircase up the middle. After the company built a new flagship on Madison Avenue near 61st Street and then hit some financial snags, it filed for bankruptcy in 1996 and closed the Seventh Avenue store — but then came back 20 years later and re-leased it, opening once again in 2016. This time the run was brief, just three years before a second bankruptcy, after which the final indignity hit hard: It did a stint as a Spirit Halloween. Landau, reports Crain’s, got 57,000 square feet across five floors at what seems like a superb bargain, paying $11 million. (It sold for double that amount last year, four times that in 2014. A condo upstairs in the residential portion of the building, which is known as 161 West 16th Street, is listed for $1.495 million — and it’s a one-bedroom comprising fewer than 1,000 square feet.) The developer, who has recently gone on a church-buying spree in Brooklyn, is most likely not going to put more shopping there but apartments instead.

The Florent and Barneys customer of 1990 was perhaps able to hang on to a lower-Manhattan apartment — but if rising prices got in the way, he or she was likely to take the L one stop to then-cheap Williamsburg. There lay another late-night hangout, the 1952 stainless-steel Wythe Diner, which later was home to a decently reviewed Mexican restaurant, Café de la Esquina, as well as a couple of other businesses. (Blank Street, the ubiquitous minimalist coffee chain, got started as a coffee cart outside the building.) And it, too, is about to bite the dust after a long and well-covered twilight. It’s been evident for a decade that it would come down; corner lots close to the Brooklyn waterfront are hard to come by, and a beat-up one-story restaurant was not going to go unnoticed. Six residential stories will soon replace it, and if there’s coffee available on the ground floor it’s unlikely to be dispensed from a big stainless-steel urn into a thick china cup, and certainly not at 2 a.m.