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Eataly Will Open in July
A representative from the Westfield World Trade Center mall is at this morning’s meeting of the Lower Manhattan Marketing Association, and Pen Parentis founder M.M. De Voe live-tweeted several exciting updates:
••• A hundred of the Westfield World Trade Center stores are due to open within a year, and the first one will debut on August 16.
••• The Eataly inside 4 World Trade Center is now looking to open in July—that’s a month earlier than the last report.
••• The mall shops “are expected to be open seven days a week.” (This wouldn’t be news anywhere except FiDi, hitherto a dead zone on weekends.)
••• The Oculus, the plaza between the Oculus and Church Street, and Cortlandt Way (rendered below, it’s the pedestrian-only street between 3WTC and 4WTC) will be “arts-committed spaces,” with events and programming.
Thanks, M.M.! Pen Parentis, if you didn’t know, is an organization for parents who are writers (and/or writers who are parents)? It hosts monthly salons that are also open to non-writers and non-parents.
UPDATE: Luis Vazquez of the FiDi Fan Page sent over a bunch of other updates from the Community Board 1 FiDi and Planning Committees:
••• There will be 120 stores at the Westfield World Trade Center mall.
••• Demolition of the temporary PATH station is expected to begin in late summer.
••• The World Trade Center Performing Arts Center is now in the design phase and has 85 employees. It will be a home for the Tribeca Film Festival, and naming opportunities are under negotiation. There will be three theaters on the ground floor holding 199, 299 and 499 seats, and they can be combined to created one 1,200-square-foot theater. The WTC PAC will be open from morning to late evening with a ground-level café/restaurant and performances throughout the day and evening. Completion date is contingent on many moving parts, but they are hoping for 2020.
••• 3 World Trade Center is on track to open in 2018.
••• The E train connection to the Oculus and WTC Westfield may begin construction by this summer, which means it could open as early as the end of the year.
••• The Dey Street connector will be expanded from the R Cortland Street station to the 1 train Cortlandt station. The extra-wide corridor will be lined with stores as well.
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Do we know when the Oculus will fully open?
I feel like a security guard there told me that the second half would open this month, but I have no record of it. The stores will come much later.
I’ll believe it when I see it. It was less than a year ago that I received a flyer in the mail from Westfield (operators of the Westfield World Trade Center) announcing that the mall would be open on December 17, 2015. Then they delayed that until the “first half of 2016” and then August 2016 and now we’re hearing that only the first store will be open in August. Also, as recently as March, it was stated that Eataly would be open in April and now they’re saying July. From the looks of things, construction on any of the stores has barely started and – given how long it has taken Brookfield to finish construction its stores – I hold out absolutely no hope that Westfield will somehow do a quicker job and have things open by July or August. I think we’d be lucky to see anything open until 2017. For whatever reason, Westfield (a seemingly successful mall developer and operator in other parts of the world) can’t seem to get its act together in NYC. From the much delayed opening of stores in the Fulton Center (well over a year after the Fulton Center itself opened) to the constant construction delays and blown opening dates at the World Trade, it seems that Westfield doesn’t have what it takes to get the job done in a timely fashion. I’m not holding by breath for an August 2016 opening.
Well, we’re getting towards the end of July and Eataly still looks nowhere near opening. In March, they said they’d be open in April and then as of today, they’re still saying July. As for the mall as a whole, they’re still saying August even though the place still looks every bit as much as the unfinished construction site that it was in March. I don’t think anyone involved with the World Trade Center really knows what they’re talking about. They’ve blown deadline after deadline.
No clue about Eataly’s prospects but when I walked through the WTC mall on Thursday, many of the stores had doors open, and they were significantly less raw than they had been a few weeks ago. I think we’ll see some open in August, but maybe less than Westfield had hoped.
The Westfield WTC has said that the first wave of stores would begin opening on August 16th. They never said all of them would open on that date. Eataly, on the other hand, was always on a separate schedule and was supposed to open before the other stores. Perhaps not. :-)
Eataly had a booth at that to-do when they opened the lawn at The Battery, and the guy I talked to said it was opening August 16. There are stores that look like they will also make it–Banana Republic, Hugo Boss, Pandora, Sephora, a few others.
That makes sense – Eataly is the only store that seems to me to be really close actually. I’ve been stalking it (from the sidewalk) and the space looks to be mostly finished out. They’ve got shelving and some sign type things up there as well. The rest of the stores look further behind than that, from what I’ve seen peering in when doors are open, but they don’t seem so far behind that I imagine some of them will be done on time. (The Target space on the other hand? Whew. I can’t imagine that being done by the end of the year despite it’s projected fall opening)