NEW YORK -- For years, Bryant Park Grill & Cafe in midtown Manhattan has been one of the country's top-grossing restaurants, the star property in Ark Restaurants' portfolio of 20 restaurants across the United States.
But what propelled it to the top has vanished.
The tourists are gone, the office towers surrounding it are largely empty, and the restaurant's 1,000-seat dining room is closed. Instead, dinner is cooked and served on its patio, and the scaled-down restaurant takes in about $12,000 a day -- an 85% plunge in revenue, its chief executive said.
Five months into the pandemic, the drastic turn of events at businesses like Bryant Park Grill & Cafe that are part of national chains shows how the economic damage in New York has in many cases been far worse than elsewhere in the country.
In the heart of Manhattan, national chains including J.C. Penney, Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have shuttered branches for good. Many other large brands, like Victoria's Secret and the Gap, have kept their high-profile locations closed in Manhattan, while reopening in other states.
[CORONAVIRUS: Click here for our complete coverage » arkansasonline.com/coronavirus]
Michael Weinstein, chief executive of Ark Restaurants, who owns Bryant Park Grill & Cafe and 19 other restaurants, said he will never open another restaurant in New York.
Of Ark Restaurants' five Manhattan restaurants, only two have reopened, while its properties in Florida -- where the virus is far worse -- have expanded outdoor seating with tents and tables into their parking lots, serving almost as many guests as they had indoors.
"There's no reason to do business in New York," Weinstein said. "I can do the same volume in Florida in the same square feet as I would have in New York, with my expenses being much less."
The city is home to many flagship stores, chains and high-profile restaurants that tolerated astronomical rents and other costs because of New York's global cachet and the reliable onslaught of tourists and commuters.
But New York today looks nothing like it did just a few months ago.
In Manhattan's major retail corridors, from SoHo to Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue, once-packed sidewalks are now nearly empty. A fraction of the usual army of office workers goes in to work every day, and many wealthy residents have left the city for second homes.
Many stores are still closed, some permanently, while those that are open have very little foot traffic.
For four months, the Victoria's Secret flagship store at Herald Square in Manhattan has been closed and not paying its $937,000 monthly rent. "It will be years before retail has even a chance of returning to New York City in its pre-covid form," the retailer's parent company recently told its landlord in a legal document.
"In the prime real estate areas, all the stores rely on having half international tourists and half local tourists or those from the local neighborhoods," said Thiago Hueb, a founder of a jewelry company who had decided to close his flagship store on Madison Avenue before the pandemic struck because of high rents.
Now brokers are calling him trying to lure him back to the block, but Hueb, whose jewelry is sold in 80 department stores nationwide, is not interested.
"The avenue is no longer what it used to be," he said.
J.C. Penney and Neiman Marcus, the anchor tenants at two of the largest malls in Manhattan, recently filed for bankruptcy and announced that they would shutter those locations.
Some popular chains, like Shake Shack and Chipotle, report that their stores in New York were performing worse than others elsewhere, investment analysts said. A few dozen Subway locations have closed in New York City in recent months.
Landlords have started filing lawsuits against commercial tenants for not paying rent, accusing some national brands of trying to take advantage of the crisis.
"SL Green and landlords across the city have worked with retailers large and small to protect jobs and New York's tax base during this crisis," said Stephen Meister, a lawyer representing SL Green, which leases the Herald Square store to Victoria's Secret.
But, he added, "Victoria's Secret is a multibillion-dollar, publicly traded conglomerate exploiting the situation in an attempt to avoid paying its contractual rent obligations."
The store's parent company, L Brands, did not respond to a request for comment.