The Arc of a Niche: The Bowery’s Home Lighting Niche

The key intersection for The Bowery’s home lighting niche, which is about 50 years old.

The Bowery Mission, a remnant of a famed, if unsavory, past

Some home lighting shops on The Bowery 1 

Some home lighting shops on The Bowery 2

Some home lighting shops on The Bowery 3 

My initial thinking about retail niches was greatly influenced by my experiences shopping for antiques in Waynesville, …

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An Expanded Notion of Commercial Nodes

Over the years, I have often been analytically frustrated by geographically fragmented downtowns and neighborhood commercial districts, not knowing what to call and how to define the fragmented parts. In recent assignments in Morristown, NJ and and Long Island City, NY, I have used an expanded notion of a commercial node to address this problem and found it is a heuristically useful solution.

To my ken, the term commercial node is usually applied to …

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3-D Television

This past Saturday my wife and I stopped by the Samsung showroom at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. They were featuring a number of 3-D TVs and we were able, after donning the appropriate glasses, to see what their images really looked like.

I was frankly surprised by how good it was. This technology is worthy of respect.

For downtown theaters it is one more technological improvement that makes home movie viewing their most serious competitor.

That said, it also should …

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Movies Update

For several years now, I have been arguing that the average downtown movie theater is in trouble as more and more people watch more and more films at home or even on their mobile devices. To counter this trend I have encouraged downtown theaters to rekindle “going to the movies” as a special occasion by adopting modern digital, 3D and IMAX projection systems and/or by integrating their cinemas with a restaurant, brew pub or ice cream parlor.

An article in today’s …

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AFFORDABLE DOWNTOWN RETAIL RENTS

Introduction. As we slowly emerge from the Great Recession the time has come for downtown organizations to work hard on encouraging small independent retailers to seek affordable rents and for landlords to offer them. If they do not, downtown retail will contract and street level storefronts will be occupied even more by financial and personal service operations – or remain vacant for long periods of time.

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