Shopping Spree

Big news about I-80, as I'm sure you've heard. I've got three tests on Thursday though, so my commentary is going to have to wait until tomorrow afternoon.

Just a quick post that I've been mulling over re: the PG's article on Lower Fifth Avenue retail. The article discusses the resurgence of retail options in the area of Fifth Avenue near Market Square and beyond. A couple of things struck me as particularly interesting.

I'm in the process of writing a term paper on retail gentrification, and I've noticed that gentrification tends to cluster in three categories. I use the term "Banana Belt" to describe high end, national chains such as you find in Shadyside. "Boutique Belt" describes areas with a high prevalence of unique shops, a la Lawrenceville. "Big Box Belt" is a corridor with a lot of large chains like Home Depot and Target (a la East Liberty). While these corridors aren't always clear cut, I would say that I'm noticing a high concentration of specialty stores in the downtown retail scene. This strategy is interesting to me, because it is fairly different from what has been done previously. When I talked to Tom Murphy about Fifth-Forbes development last year, he told me that his plan had always been to try to make downtown a unique corridor where there were options not available anywhere else. Unfortunately, for him, that meant Lord and Taylor and Lazurus (and unsuccessfully, Nordstrom). But as we're finding with the South Side, stores like that won't just stay in one place if the market wants them (the department store strategy was also a failure for other reasons, but work with me here). National retailers will do what national retailers do, which is expand. This tends to dilute the market, and make downtown less of a destination for shoppers. But a downtown (or any neighborhood, really) filled with independent shops not available anywhere else will be more successful, because these stores will not flee to the suburbs so quickly.

The second thing that I noticed is that there isn't actually a lot of new retail happening here- it's just retail that's shifting:

• "Heinz Healey's men's store to move from Station Square"
• "Nettleton Shop of Pittsburgh, a men's shoe store, to move from Oxford Centre"
• "Larrimor's clothing store relocated from Grant Street "
• "A popular Downtown hair salon, Izzazu Salon and Spa, also will move"
• "He also intends to move Prantl's and Mancini's bakeries a short distance"

So out of the stores that were mentioned by name, only one has not had a presence in the immediate downtown area. What I would say that we are seeing is a shifting in the poles of retail in greater downtown. Station Square is nearly 15 years old, and while it's too early to write its eulogy, the retail options have certainly been thinning there. Grant street, Pittsburgh's center of wealth for a century, is starting to wane, at least from a retail perspective, in favor of the younger, hipper areas near Point Park and Market Square (keeping in mind, of course, that downtown is geographically microscopic compared to many other American CBDs). I'm not necessarily saying that the polarity of downtown retail is a bad thing. On the contrary, I'd actually prefer to not have to hoof from Kuntz & Ryder in Oxford Centre to Saks Fifth Avenue on Smithfield during my lunch break. Concentrating retail options in a particular section of downtown will likely produce a multiplier affect. But it will be interesting to see what Grant and Smithfield look like in 5 years.

Overall, I'm encouraged by what is happening downtown. Can't wait to see it again when I return in a few months.