UPPER WEST SIDE — Barbara Adler knows the neighborhood has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, because she's been here watching it the entire time.
Adler, executive director of the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District, grew up on the Upper West Side and raised her children in the neighborhood.
So, when Columbus Avenue was in need of help, she stepped into the role to help shape the historic stretch's evolution.
Adler sat down with DNAinfo New York reporter Emily Frost to talk about changes along the popular avenue, what's been lost with the shift to more upscale stores, and why she's excited by the street's "renaissance."
Emily: Barbara, people know you as the head of the BID, but tell us more about who you are and your history in the neighborhood. When did you first move here?
Barbara: I hate to date myself from the very beginning, but I have lived on the Upper West Side for over 50 years. I went to school here, my parents moved here before I started high school, and I've been here ever since. And I've moved around the neighborhood a number of times, but always on the Upper West Side. 10023, 10024, a brief foray into 10025, but now I'm back in 10023.
Emily: 50 years is a long span. What have you seen happen to the neighborhood since you moved here? What was it like growing up and then later?
Barbara: The neighborhood has changed really dramatically. I grew up on Central Park West and 88th Street, and when I wanted to go to Broadway in those days, my parents made me wait for the crosstown Bus at 86th and Central Park to go to Broadway because the side streets, which are now fancy one-family and shared-family brownstones, they were single-room occupancies, and on the steps were people by the dozens sitting outside with paper bags drinking whiskey. It just wasn't safe in those days, and of course, that is very dramatically changed now.
Emily: Did you go away at any point and then come back and why did you come back?
Barbara: I lived in Malibu for a year and I lived in San Francisco for about six months. Then I came back, and I came right back to the Upper West Side. I raised my three kids here. I was married, now I'm divorced, but I have a longtime partner.
Emily: You raised your three kids here, and what was that like?
Barbara: It was fantastic. It's if you're a suburban mom, you're in your car all the time, so they say, shuttling your kids from one thing to the next, but when your kids grow up in the city, they gain street smarts pretty quickly. My son was mugged once on the way home from school and he learned very quickly what he should be doing and not doing on his way to and from. Otherwise, it was ...
Emily: What did you tell him?
Barbara: There's still some decals on some of the shops for safe havens and most of the shops on Broadway had those, and if anybody is following you or looking suspicious, you jump into a store and with or without a decal, and you stay there until it's safe to move on.
Emily: Columbus Avenue 50 years ago, 20 years ago, today, what was it like back then?
Barbara: When I first got my job, which was 16 years ago, I would say that a good third to half of the shops were out of business on Columbus Avenue. Vacant, a little derelict. There were a lot of pretty amazing mom-and-pop-type, one-of-a-kind shops on Columbus at that time, and a lot of things started out there like the Silver Palette, which now is a major line. You can find their products in any supermarket. They had their own store and they started there, and the woman who cooked for them lived on the Upper West Side, and you could also get their food, which was prepared fresh daily. There were just some wonderful places.
In 1996, the City of New York decided to do the Columbus reconstruction project. They felt that it was time for Columbus Avenue to have what they call a lot line to lot line reconstruction, which required moving everything from the streets, the sidewalks, the curbs, the infrastructure from one side of the avenue to the other side of the avenue. Although they said that it would be done incrementally, it was not. It was done in large chunks and so Columbus Avenue became an impossible place to walk, an impossible place to shop, and the businesses could not sustain themselves and many of them closed during that period of time. And it was a long project. It went on for more than two years. Two and a half years.
Emily: Why did they decide to do that?
Barbara: They do that periodically in the city where they decide that the infrastructure is really old and the sewers and the pipes and everything that's underneath the streets, et cetera, need to be changed.
Emily: Columbus Avenue experienced what Second Avenue has to be going through where just it's so hard to survive?
Barbara: Very similar. Yes. Right. Good comparison. At the time, I was on the Community Board and I was on the Community Board for many years, 22 years until a few years ago. During that period of time, I was co-chair of a number of committees. At the time, I was co-chair of Transportation [Committee] and we had regular meetings with some of the merchants who were able to survive. One of them was Steve Hanson, the owner of Isabella's, which of course is still there now, one of the first restaurants. He was extremely concerned about what was going on, and so the meetings were actually held in his restaurant, and it was during that period of time that I became aware of how necessary a BID could be and what a BID could be doing for an avenue like that.
At the time, not even the Lincoln Square BID was formed, and my background is as an illustrator, but having had a lot of experience dealing with my neighborhood, I really became pretty expert on just about everything that was going on there. By the time the Columbus Avenue BID rolled around, I applied for the job, and I got it.
Emily: The job of Executive Director?
Barbara: Yeah.
Emily: What were some of your first duties?
Barbara: We examined the avenue with a fine-toothed comb. We determined what we needed. The first thing we did, one of the very first things we did was to install 110 tree guards on our streets, and we began to plant the tree beds, which had never been planted. They were just barren little plots of soil, and we continued to plant those seasonally.
Emily: Do you think that makes a big difference in the feel?
Barbara: It makes a huge difference. We began to clean up the graffiti that was not only on the buildings but also on all of our street furniture, and also I think that the landlords made a major effort in trying to lure people to Columbus Avenue by lowering the rates, which do yo-yo up and down depending on how hot the avenue is at a particular time. That's not only true of Columbus but it's really true of the whole city, I believe.
Emily: When did the reshaping of Columbus Avenue's reputation really take off? When did it start to become a destination?
Barbara: I would say that within the first few years of — maybe the first five years, because I remembered we did get written up by Crain's and not get the greatest review. It was very upsetting to us, but there was a turnaround not very long after that, and then all of a sudden we became a really hot avenue, and we began to attract retail and restaurants.
Emily: What did the Crain's article say?
Barbara: It said it was very derelict and it would never come back, and they were absolutely wrong because a year and a half ago we were tooting our horns that Columbus Avenue had 100percent occupancy and that we got into the newspapers for that. We were the only neighborhood in the entire city of New York that had 100percent occupancy in their commercial districts. We're really proud of that. Then what happens with things like that is the landlords say, "I'm in such a hot district now, I'm going to raise my leases," and before you know it, people can't sustain what they committed for, and they're out of business. Then suddenly you find that whoa, wait a minute, what happened here? We have a lot of vacancies. We also went through a time like that and now we're on the way back up.
Emily: To 100 percent or closer to that. Closer to full occupancy.
Barbara: I think we're at 90 percent, maybe 93 percent right now. We still have some vacancies. Some places are spoken for but not evident yet on the avenue.
Emily: The turnaround started to happen maybe five years after the reconstruction.
Barbara: Yeah, I think so.
Emily: Why did you feel that it was having a real renaissance?
Barbara: Because suddenly people were clamoring to be on Columbus Avenue, and we have a great variety of things. It wasn’t known as the cutting-edge avenue, but then suddenly we had places like Intermix and Theory, and a lot of the well-known clothing brands moving in, and some hot restaurants on the avenue, and then all of a sudden cosmetic places wanted to be on Columbus Avenue. We had a whole slew of them coming, still.
Emily: Like Fresh and Kiehl’s.
Barbara: Yes and Clarins.
Emily: Now the avenue is at a place where there are a lot of really upscale stores. There's $100 mustard jar being sold.
Barbara: Correct.
Emily: Do you think it swung too far in that direction where it's unaffordable for locals?
Barbara: When you say locals…
Emily: Local residents that want to shop on the avenue.
Barbara: It doesn't appear to be the case. I think that people who live in this area are upwardly mobile and they're able to afford it and they pay very high prices for their real estate or for their rentals around here.
Emily: The affluence on the avenue is matched by the residents.
Barbara: I think yes, very much so.
Emily: They go hand in hand.
Barbara: Yes. Then, of course, our shops are frequented, also, by the tourists who come to the two museums that we have here.
Emily: Some of the older businesses, the Emerald Inn was here for 70 years and then was replaced by Kate Spade. What's the downside of that, do you think, of older businesses being replaced by stores that are available elsewhere?
Barbara: It's very unfortunate because although the Emerald Inn was not one of my favorites, it was a one-of-a-kind place that had been here for many, many years. When national brands start to move in, the neighborhood definitely changes somewhat.
Emily: Do you think that there are too many chain stores or that it's getting mallified?
Barbara: Columbus Avenue is completely within the historic district. It's all low-rise architecture that's over 100 years old, and it's ...
Emily: It's barred from building high rises.
Barbara: Absolutely.
Emily: Because it's historic.
Barbara: It has strict controls on it by Landmarks Preservation Commission, and it's a tree-lined avenue, and it's a very pleasant stroll from one end of the avenue to the other, really. It's lovely. I think that a lot of people appreciate it just for that.
Emily: That's a control against maybe a Best Buy or a large big-box store coming in because the storefronts are landmarked.
Barbara: That's exactly right. We don't have any housing stock that could accommodate a Best Buy or anything like that, so we really don't have to worry about big-box stores coming to Columbus Avenue.
Emily: I've noticed that a lot of restaurants have changed over to clothing stores. Do you think that that's a trend that's going to continue?
Barbara: I think that it's cyclical. How these things do happen, I don't know, but it's bad. I think you're correct, that we have seen that kind of a change going on at Columbus Avenue. Many of the restaurants we have are just amazingly popular like Cafe Tallulah, like Ocean Grill, Isabella's, and many others.
Emily: On the flip side, there are, as I mentioned, some vacancies that are persistent, like the Bang & Olufsen store. What do you think s going on there? Why are they still vacant?
Barbara: Footlights is not vacant anymore.
Emily: Rain is there. It was vacant for a while, though.
Barbara: It's interesting you should ask me about that particular location. They had so many problems with the Department of Buildings getting their permits that the first people who were supposed to go in there a good year and a half or two years ago, started work on the place and were so fed up with the Department of Buildings that they threw in the towel on the project and canceled their lease, and had already put in, from what I understand, a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of work in that place, because they just couldn't handle it.
This is not something completely new. We do hear from a lot of lessees that working with the DOB is just very, very difficult — where they're held responsible for issues that may be going on in the whole building in their one shop and it's very hard to be able to sustain yourself that way.
Emily: How do you coach businesses in that? Is there any way that you're working to make that process happen faster?
Barbara: No. I really don't get involved with it at all. If we know that there's a new place coming, we do refer them to the city's new ... They have a new division. The city has a new division that supposedly helps speed new businesses by assigning one person to oversee everything and trying to coordinate all the various permits that they need from many different agencies.
Emily: Are landlords just holding out for a really big rent?
Barbara: I think they are, yes.
Emily: Is there anything you can do, because I'm sure that it frustrates you to see a space empty for year upon after year.
Barbara: It's extremely frustrating, and like with any other neighborhood, I assume there's a place is vacant for a really long time, you've other issues with it where a homeless people will move in to an alcove and they're issues. The place gets graffitied and begins to look derelict.
Emily: Any levers you can use to push the landlords to consider it?
Barbara: Occasionally.
Emily: For people that don't understand what a BID does and what your BID does, what do you do on a daily basis?
Barbara: My job is to make Columbus Avenue as successful as it possibly can be, and we do that in a variety of ways by trying to call attention to Columbus Avenue, and that is why we started our New Taste of the Upper West Side event to celebrate all the wonderful restaurants that have opened on the Upper West Side. New Taste of the Upper West Side is a three-day food event, which has over 40 restaurants for each of the two main events and a smaller event called Soiree in the Park, which is a benefit for Theodore Roosevelt Park.
Emily: What do you think it does for businesses?
Barbara: I think it's been fantastic for the businesses here on the Upper West Side, and that is evidenced by the fact that the same restaurants want to participate year after year after year. This year's events are May 27 through May 30, and we have a great lineup of chefs on Saturday night, our Best of the West, you'll find Jean-Georges, Daniel Boulud, John Fraser, all the chefs from the greatest restaurants that we have on the Upper West Side, and a great lineup of entertainment and live music all three nights, and some surprises that I'm not going to talk about now because I want people to be surprised when they come in, but some really great things going on and some fantastic hosts, also.
Emily: It's a chance for people who haven't tasted the food at each restaurant to get a little sample and to ...
Barbara: Yes, and to meet the chefs, and the chefs love the event because they say it's an opportunity to meet their clientele and also to meet potential new clientele. Every chef does his best, puts his best foot forward, and makes a beautiful display on his table.
Emily: Yeah, so critics love to poo-poo the Upper West Side food scene. They love to say it's bland or it's not exciting or it's this. It's not trendy. What do you say to that?
Barbara: I say that's ridiculous and I think there's one critic in particular who blasted Columbus Avenue recently, and that person was Steve Cuozzo from the New York Post. The comments that his article got on ...
Emily: People fought back?
Barbara: The Upper West Side absolutely fought back. We have great restaurants here on the Upper West Side. There's a huge variety of restaurants to suit any palette, any price bracket.
Emily: He said people dine early and go to bed. Is that true? Do you see people out and about late at night?
Barbara: Absolutely not true. No. It's not. In fact, the restaurants really ... It may not be as crowded as it is in TriBeCa, where my son lives, but I would say that if you dine in the 7:00-7:30 bracket, as I tend to, the restaurants are not that crowded but by the time I'm leaving at 9:00, the restaurants are much more crowded. I think that's definitely not the case.
Emily: How important are sidewalk cafes to the success of restaurants on Columbus Avenue?
Barbara: I think they're amazingly important for a lot of reasons, and I fought for them when I was a community board member going way back when it has hard to get a café here, where people didn't understand. I remember a time when we didn't even have one café on the Columbus Avenue, and the cafes offer light and life and safety to an avenue, and keep it lit at night and keeps eyes on the street. Today, if you walked out Columbus Avenue, we have so many cafes, it's really like Europe, and it's wonderful. It's just a wonderful thing, I'm very much in favor of them.
Emily: Some people oppose them and fight them because of space constraints. What were you fighting against?
Barbara: That is exactly what I was fighting against, and including with some of my own community board members who felt that the sidewalks were too narrow and couldn't accommodate the nine feet of width that our community board allows for a sidewalk café. If you walk down Greenwich Village, some of the sidewalks are so narrow, you have to walk single file and surely that is not the case on Columbus Avenue, where we have normal-sized sidewalks and it's just a very charming avenue, and the cafes add dramatically to that.
One of the things that we are hoping to do for retail on Columbus Avenue is to establish some kind of a retail event that we can put on so that we can put our retail on the map the same way we have done for New Taste of the Upper West Side, and we hope to do our first event sometime this fall. It's still very much in the talking stages and it will probably start out small, but I hope that it will continue to grow into something that's very major that people won't want to miss.
Emily: Would that be a fair where all the vendors would have something to sell or …?
Barbara: No, it won't be like that at all. I think that what we are possibly going to do this year, although I don't want to be held to that, is to have musicians up and down the avenue, all kinds of musicians, like a little night music on Columbus Avenue, and encourage the shops to stay open later and to have the shops all provide some goodies, some wine, champagne, chocolate-dipped strawberries, whatever special sales, and a lot of goings on in the avenue on a particular day and evening.
Emily: One of the first things that you put in were the tree guards, but since then you created a streetscape. Can you describe why you added that to the avenue?
Barbara: Yeah. Sure. I'd love to. One of the issues that we identified from the very start of the BID was the fact that between 76th and 77th, we had a schoolyard, no commercial enterprises, no residential buildings, nothing going on there, no seating, no trees, nothing, barren.
Emily: It was just a fence.
Barbara: Just a chain-link fence that was extremely ugly, and we felt that we needed money to be able to do something there. We very much wanted to do something there but we didn't have the money to do it. The New Taste of the Upper West Side provided a means for us to get a little bit of revenue, that doesn't make a lot of money, and also we give away a tremendous amount of money, the bulk of the money goes to other not-for-profits, including supporting the operational expenses for Wellness in the Schools, which is in the schoolyard where we hold the event.
We put our money away year after year and we eventually, after five years, got enough money to design the ... It was designed for us by DOT, but we got enough money to build a streetscape, and it involved putting in these undulating tree beds, new trees, expanding the few tree guards that were there to be double in size, adding some new ones there on the curbside, putting in a bioswale, which is a water retention unit, and very important, and should be used by more neighborhoods in the city. It's a wonderful way to collect water instead of wasting it and having it go into the sewer.
Emily: Or having a flood.
Barbara: Having a flood. A lot of seating on the avenue, which we didn't have at all before, and we went from having a block that was totally barren to creating a go-to place, really a great meeting and greeting place in the hub of Columbus Avenue, and right across from the museum.
Emily: What have people said to you about the streetscape?
Barbara: They love it. We have gotten enormous kudos for this project. We've gotten letters about it, we've gotten emails from strangers, people I've met on the street who know that I'm connected to Columbus Avenue come over and they thank me for having done this and providing a place to sit. We'd like to continue to expand some of the tree pits going down Columbus Avenue and going up Columbus Ave, as well, and doing more greening efforts.
Emily: Do you think there's another spot along the avenue where you could put a streetscape?
Barbara: No. Probably not the same type of streetscape and a few years ago, we did work with DOT to put in the city benches wherever they would allow us to have them. There's a lot of confines, it has to be so many feet from all kinds of different things that you're not even aware of. Things that are just in the sidewalk and access, there are various types of access things, but we put them in wherever we were allowed to put them.
Emily: The bike lane is a major feature of the avenue now. That came in several years ago. Is that still a concern for businesses and people on the avenue?
Barbara: There's a few people who's still a little bit grumpy about it, but I think by and large people have gotten used to them, and it's very much part of any kind of sustainable neighborhood, and a greening effort that is well worth the negatives and ...
Emily: Do you think it helps with business, with people maybe riding their bike down Columbus Avenue and seeing the stores more?
Barbara: Emily, we only had a small piece of a bike lane on Columbus Avenue, but now the city is expanding and we're finally getting connected from 77th Street, where they left off, to all the way down connecting with Ninth Avenue, and that's coming along the pipe shortly. I believe later this summer, and with that, we're getting bike stations, and that's another thing. We haven't had any of those.
Emily: Right. The Citi Bike stations.
Barbara: The Citi Bike stations.
Emily: Where people can jump on. Those will be along Columbus Avenue.
Barbara: Yes. Absolutely. Yes.
Emily: Do you see that as a good thing for the avenue?
Barbara: I see it as a very good thing for the avenue. It's another way for people to travel around and again, if you're a tourist at the museum, instead of getting in a cab when you leave, why not take a Citi Bike and tour down the avenue? I'm hopeful that a lot of people will be doing that.
Emily: In your span of being here, are there things that you miss from the way the neighborhood used to be and things that you're so happy that have changed?
Barbara: I missed the unique element that Columbus Avenue and the rest of the Upper West Side used to have. We have a new bookstore on Columbus Avenue and although, I'm not really involved with it at all, I take great pride in the fact that a bookstore did choose to open on Columbus Avenue, an independent bookseller, a brave man named Chris Doeblin who has two other bookstores near Columbia University. It's a wonderful store and it's that element, which has died over the years that I do miss here.
Emily: That quirky, interesting, independent store.
Barbara: Exactly.
Emily: Are there stores that you miss in particular that you wish had made it?
Barbara: We used to have a lot of one-of-a-kind shops in the old days where there was a fantastic store called Mythology. It sold all kinds of quirky gifts and things, and it was just a collection like none other person. Somebody's personal collection and it was just a great go-to store, as I mentioned before. Silver Palate started on Columbus Avenue both with daily prepared food as well as things that they put into bottles, now major line, which you can find just about anywhere.
We had DDL on Columbus Avenue. It stood for Dino De Laurentiis, who got this very large space and opened a food emporium there, sort of like Eataly, in the Flatiron Building. It was way ahead of its time and it was amazing. You could go in there and you could find a combination of Zabars and Fairway and everything rolled into one. It was prepared food, it was a café, it had an extravagant skylight, and it was really great, but it was very short-lived. It was just too early for its time and probably very expensive to maintain.
Emily: Is rent one of the main reasons why these businesses go out of business or is it just their time? As you said, it was that people didn't quite get it.
Barbara: I think it's really a variety of things. I think by and large, the rents are fairly high now across avenue.
Emily: How do you anticipate the museum expansion affecting the avenue?
Barbara: We are very excited about the museum's expansion project, which is to create a real entrance on Columbus Avenue, the first ...
Emily: For the Natural History Museum.
Barbara: For the Museum of Natural History, and it happens to be the 79th Street and Columbus Avenue, which is just where we hold our Soiree in the Park right now. It's pretty much a paved area that will be built out and we see an amazing opportunity for the developers, the architects, and the landscapers who are working on this project to include some kind of an entrance and a go-to spot like the Impromptu steps of the museum both at the Museum of Natural History and museums all over the world, steps are always like the meeting and greeting places, and we feel that there's a tremendous opportunity here to do something that's really special to attract people and with a front door right on Columbus Avenue. I think it will be great for the restaurants and retailers.
Emily: You'd have steps at the Metropolitan Museum where people can hang out and it's leading, and it's opening on to Columbus?
Barbara: No. I'm not staying steps. We already have steps on the Central Park West side, but something else in Times Square they created a stairway to nowhere except to watch the crowds, and it's bright red at night, and at Lincoln Center on top of one of the restaurants, they created a grassy knoll, which people can walk up and sit and lie in the sun. Something like that, special and unique.
Emily: You have lived here and you like the way the neighborhood has changed, and you like the character that it’s maintained. Why would you encourage someone to move here?
Barbara: The Upper West Side is just a real neighborhood. It's a friendly, let your hair down kind of place. A lot of families choose to raise their children here. We have wonderful schools in the neighborhood. The streets are safe to walk. We have Central Park, we have Riverside Park. It's just a great neighborhood for families and singles alike. It's just a great place to live. I've been happy here for over 50 years going strong.
Emily: Thank you so much for talking with me. I really appreciate it.
Barbara: Thank you. My pleasure.
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