Wegmans yesterday announced that its first Manhattan store, located on Astor Place in the East Village, is scheduled to open on Wednesday, October 18.
The store is going in at 770 Broadway, in an old Kmart location. Wegmans has one other store in New York City, across the East River in Brooklyn, and currently has 109 stores operating up and down the east coast. The Astor Place store is part of a broader move by the company into the New York metropolitan area – it has a store in Harrison, New York; several stores in New Jersey; and a store in the planning stages in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Wegmans said that an on-site foodservice offering, which will include a sushi bar and champagne-oyster bar, is scheduled to open in the Astor Place store in 2024.
KC’s View:
The Astor Place neighborhood is one of the cooler parts of Manhattan (the Public Theater, New York University, Cooper Union and all sorts of expensive residential real estate are all within blocks) and I think the Wegmans store there will be very successful – Greenwich Village is kind of an ideal location for its food-forward approach.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the Wegmans folks have cooked up for Astor Place. And, as a bonus, when I visit I’ll be able to walk a couple of blocks to McSorley’s Old Ale House, which was opened by John McSorley at 15 East 7th Street in 1854 and still operates there today. A fair amount of my misspent youth took place there, drinking dark beer and enjoying the cheese plates.
McSorley’s was known for not allowing women inside until it was forced to by court order in 1970; they only installed a women’s lavatory in 1986. That said, McSorley’s had one bathroom that everybody used during that 16-year period, long before “gender neutral bathrooms” became a matter of cultural debate. We all just figured it out, got along, and then had another beer. There’s a lesson there.
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