Tribeca Rebuilt Its Morning in Doors Other Shops Left Behind

At 121 Reade, where Hudson Street meets Bogardus Plaza, the lights are back on in the room Kings used to fill. Apollo Bagels moved in this summer and turned it into a roomy cafe with booths along the Bogardus side. On opening, co-founder Joey Scalabrino told Tribeca Citizen, "We will try to do right by Kings."

That line could hang over most of the new places to get coffee or a bagel in Tribeca this year. Most of them moved into a door someone else had just left, whether a coffee window, a hotel lobby, a chain storefront or a diner-ready room. And the newcomers are each built around one specialty rather than a little of everything.

Most new counters took over a vacated address

Neiberhud is the clearest case. The hole-in-the-wall on Reade had been Jack's Stir Brew Coffee for roughly ten years, and the new tenant kept the pickup window that made the spot easy to use. Modern Bread & Bagel took over part of the old Duane Street Hotel, which now operates as the Duane Hotel. The bakery has no separate room and spills into the lobby, with a few seats at the southern end.

The biggest departure went the other way. On September 26, the Starbucks at West Broadway and Chambers closed. It sat at the base of the Frederick Hotel, directly above the 1/2/3, and according to Tribeca Citizen it had been there since 2000. The closure was part of a North American round the company put at about 1 percent of its coffeehouses, and the same report heard it also reached 99 Wall and 100 William in FiDi.

Each new tenant is built around one specialty

The vacated doors are going to specialists. Each operator leads with a single signature item and sizes the shop around it.

• PopUp Bagels sells only combos: three or six bagels with one 8-ounce schmear, or a dozen with two. Three bagels and a schmear came to $13 at opening. The shop has no seating and no counters, the schmear flavors change weekly, and a brunch pack for 18 runs $130.
• Apollo Bagels makes three flavors: plain, sesame and everything. The sourdough dough gives the bagels a hard crust and an open crumb. The shop also bottles its own ginger lemonade.
• Neiberhud Coffee sells coffee, with a medium drip at $4, but the owner told Tribeca Citizen the real draw is Medjool dates made at the Thompson Street shop in SoHo. They run $4 to $5 each or $35 for a box of 12. "What we do that other people don't do is dates," David Baram said.
• Modern Bread & Bagel is entirely gluten-free. Beyond bagels it sells egg sandwiches, open-faced melts, smoked fish, spreads, signature lattes and packaged cake mixes. It also takes same-day orders and preorders from one to 28 days out, which is useful for weekend guests.
• Blank Street at Sixth and Walker focuses on coffee and matcha. A large coffee is $2.95, a cappuccino $5.40 and a matcha latte $5.65. This location launched an ice cream menu in four flavors, each with a hard-shell topping.

Blank Street's model shows most plainly how the departures and arrivals connect. In May, Tribeca Citizen reported that Blank Street had taken another Starbucks space, at 140–142 West Street on the Vesey corner of 100 Barclay. ThisBowl is slated for the north corner of that retail strip. The chain started in 2020 as a coffee cart in Brooklyn. Its 2,900-square-foot shop at Sixth and Walker is one of its largest in the city and has a tiled entrance and several window seats.

Church Street now has a bagel on nearly every block

Specialists cluster where the foot traffic is, and in Tribeca that means Church Street. A reader wrote to Tribeca Citizen in September:

"After Ess opens, I think that every block on Church Street from Park Place to Duane Street will have a bagel outlet (Dunkin, Ess, Dunkin, Nala's, Dunkin again, Modern)... That's a lotta carbs! You'd think that all this competition would drive down the high cost of a bagel with a schmear a bit. Guess not…"

Running north, that list includes Nala's Bagels, which closed its Reade shop and reopened at Church and Chambers, and ends at Modern on Duane. The newcomers are adding to an existing base. Zucker's moved to a new space on Chambers in 2023. Pick-A-Bagel is still in the Goldman breezeway, Brooklyn Bread is at Greenwich and Murray, Tribeca Bagels is on Canal, and Black Seed is at Hudson Eats in Brookfield Place.

Tribeca Citizen's September roundup calls all of this the "Great Downtown Bagel Resurgence" and describes a "land grab" of bagel shops around the neighborhood. Even in a land grab, the shops have taken over rooms the neighborhood already knew.

The morning now starts at 6:30 and fades after 3

Because the new arrivals are specialists, they keep specialist hours, and that changes the shape of the day. Here is the order the doors open, with closing times:

1. 6:30 a.m. Blank Street, 32 Avenue of the Americas, open until 7 p.m., seven days.
2. 7 a.m. PopUp Bagels, 315 Greenwich, open until 4 p.m. daily.
3. 7 a.m. Apollo Bagels, 121 Reade, seven days.
4. 7 a.m. Neiberhud Coffee, 139 Reade, open until 6 p.m., seven days.
5. 8 a.m. Modern Bread & Bagel, 130 Duane, open until 3 p.m., Monday through Sunday.
6. 9 a.m. Friedmans, 378 Greenwich, open until 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 9:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.

Three counters a short walk apart, on Reade or at its Greenwich corner, all open at 7. By early afternoon, the bagel side begins to close: Modern at 3 and PopUp at 4. After that, the morning food on this list comes from Blank Street until 7 p.m. and from Friedmans.

Friedmans fills the gap the specialists leave. The newest of the group is the eighth location of a family-owned business that began in Chelsea Market in 2009. According to Tribeca Citizen, it is named for Milton Friedman, the economist behind "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch." The breakfast and lunch menu runs all day, with ricotta pancakes, avocado toast, chicken and waffles, and BELTs, and the kitchen can make everything gluten-free, although the kitchen itself is not gluten-free. The room has a raised sidewalk cafe, part of it covered, plus a bar along the whole south wall and a private room behind sliding doors.

The date that matters next week is Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 26. Friedmans is serving a fixed-price turkey plate all day starting at 11 a.m., according to Tribeca Citizen's first look. For a houseful of guests on Friday morning, Modern's preorder window and PopUp's dozen-plus-two-schmears combo are the two options on this list built for a crowd.

The next doors in line

The pattern is still playing out on four more addresses.

On Murray Street between Broadway and Church, Ess-a-Bagel has staked out a new location. It is the 50-year-old family business that started on First Avenue, and it already has a FiDi shop just south of Zuccotti Park. By November 3, the awning on Murray was up. Tompkins Square Bagels, which first opened on Avenue A in 2011, confirmed plans for the Independence Plaza retail space at Greenwich and Franklin.

Blank Street's second Tribeca-area shop, in the former Starbucks at 140–142 West Street, would give the chain another vacated corner. The most watched door is the old Starbucks at West Broadway and Chambers. In late September, the Frederick Hotel told Tribeca Citizen that several food and beverage operators were already interested in the space, and that Starbucks still held an active lease. Because the corner sits directly above the 1/2/3, whoever takes it will be the first stop of the morning for anyone coming up from the subway.

Our team watches Tribeca's retail turnover for the same reason buyers and owners do: it shows what each block is becoming. If you want to talk through what the changing storefronts on your stretch of Greenwich, Reade or Church mean for your apartment, Devin Hugh Leahy is glad to meet for coffee at whichever counter is closest to you. Inquire Now.