THE SEWARD PARK BUZZ

SPHC's Commercial Property

"Many of our commercial properties are either awaiting tenancies or turning over. Part of the board's decison making involves approving potential leases for this commercial space. What are the factors that you would consider in making a decision as to whether or not to approve a certain lease, and what is your vision for devloping this neighborhood over the next decade?"

The Q&A portion of Our Meet The Candiates meeting was kicked off with this question. All candidates offered their views, but none, in my opinion, offered a real "vision" of what our space could be. Our lives, our finances and our neighborhood are significantly impacted by our commercial tenants, but the strategy to pursue is not to "score" good commercial tenants or to dutifully frequent our local businesses. It is a matter of making our area attractive! Seward Park will not be desirable to prospective tenants if it continues to be characterized by:

Closed storefronts on weekends (please excuse the quality of the composite photos)

Ugly signage

Unappealing displays

An uninspired assortment of businesses

Our stores are big, and our sidewalks are wide enough for strolling and outdoor seating. We can have useful, attractive and profitable stores. But in order to populate our commercial spaces with good tenants, we first need to take steps to figure out what our space should be.

Cutting Corners: Making Our Neighborhood A "Destination"

Several candidates mentioned wanting our commercial properties to be a "destination". Sure it might be possible to seduce a great commercial tenant to come here — one that is not put off by the issues just reviewed. But it would be easier to integrate SPHC into the greater destination around us by developing solid commercial connections between our property, Essex Street, and Hester Street.

The way to make such connections is to find an interesting tenant for our property on the corner of Grand and Essex, and to establish a corner entrance for this property so that pedestrian traffic on Essex Street flows more readily onto Grand Street, and vice-versa. Ideally our corner location would be tenanted by a restaurant with outdoor seating. Indeed the back of that corner building (presently blocked by an unsightly driveway and gate) was formerly used as Isabella's outdoor dining area.

The flow of pedestrians from Grand Street onto Essex Street will ultimately help us — stores on Essex Street will improve to better meet our needs and draw more people to our neighborhood.

A single opening to Essex Street would be useful, but we can do much more than that. To dramatically improve our ability to frequent the stores on Essex and Hester Streets, we can open up our Hester Street property so that Shareholders can exit their buildings and access them without walking around the block.