The Walgreen Co. (Deerfield, Ill.) has announced plans to open this summer at One Times Square in New York.
The nation’s largest drugstore chain will open a three-level, 16,200-square-foot store in the building it abandoned in 1970 after operating a store there for nearly four decades.
It’s the building – between Broadway and Seventh Avenue and 42nd and 43rd streets – famous for hosting the New Year’s Eve ball (which descends along its flagpole) and was also the home of the Warner Bros. Studio Store until that space emptied in 2001. It has remained vacant since then and has largely been deemed unqualified for most retail because signs block so many of the windows.
According to the New York Times, the company is paying more than $4 million a year to lease the entire building. Although the most prominent face of the building, on the 43rd Street side, is already covered with billboards, Walgreen will be able to splash its name in huge bright-red letters over the building’s other sides.
Though Walgreen has opened more than 2000 stores across the country in the last four years, it has opened only five in Manhattan, a market dominated by other drugstore retailers: 140 Duane Reade stores, 27 CVS stores and 38 Rite-Aid stores. It’s also a market with a scarcity of large retail spaces.
Walgreen did open a new store on East 86th Street last week and plans another one this week on Third Avenue and 36th Street. At least two more stores are expected in the coming months, several replacing old Gristede’s supermarkets.