Few New York public spaces have seen such monumental turn-arounds quite like Bryant Park. What was once a Midtown Manhattan wasteland given over to derelicts and drug addicts has become one of the city’s most desirable commercial and entertainment destinations. In the early aughts, bi-annual fashion weeks helped lure the cultural crowd — and newer arrivals like an annual summer film series and winter gift market now keep them there. And then there are bakeries — lots of them — more than half-a-dozen that have popped up in and around Bryant Park, most notably along a stretch of West 40th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
The success of these businesses reflects both the larger reinvention of Bryant Park and the commercial and retail evolution of Manhattan itself. “West 40th Street has became a bakery product niche the way there are other [centralised retail] niches in New York,” said Dan Pisark, vice president for retail and amenities at Bryant Park Corporation (BPC).
Groupings of businesses selling similar products to similar customers may seem counterintuitive from a profit perspective, but they’re actually a tried-and-true retail strategy, said Tyler Winograd, retail and consumer experiences studio director at architecture and design giant Gensler. Yet while neither commercial clusters nor bakeries are unique to Bryant Park, the concept “sort of hits you [here] in the face,” Winograd said.
That “hit” stems from a roster of both longstanding and newer-to-the-neighborhood bakeries that mask Midtown’s often urban landscape. West 40th’s six key pastry shops include Heritage Grand Bakery, Lady M Cake Boutique, Blue Bottle Coffee, Le Pain Quotidien, Danish bakery Ole and Steen and French patisserie Angelina Paris. There’s also Breads Bakery and Wafels and Dinges inside Bryant Park; the Starbucks around the corner on Sixth Avenue; and the five bakery-oriented kiosks in the park’s annual Winter Village.
While the concentration of these businesses may appear random, “if they’re clustering there, it’s because there’s a need,” said Matthew Chmielecki, senior vice president at commercial real estate firm CBRE. Food is an industry that favors critical mass, Chmielecki explains, with each individual business benefiting from like-minded neighbors and customers.
A pre-existing bakery, for instance, demonstrates a viable consumer base, suggesting fewer risks for area newcomers. Why not “create an even more expensive market, if you will, with the same offerings or similar offerings where the people are?” said Winograd. “It starts to feel like the sort of rising tide lifts all boats phenomenon.”
Factors, both intentional and circumstantial, explain West 40th’s dramatic bakery ecosystem. There’s Bryant Park’s prime Midtown location, with its steady flow of businesspeople and tourists — roughly 12 million annual visitors, per BPC. Consistent foot traffic, in turn, has encouraged bakeries to embrace their neighbors as opportunity, rather than competition, and meet customer demands, which have shifted — but did not necessarily wane — since the pandemic.
“40th Street has sort of taken its orders from Bryant Park,” explained Dan Biederman, BPC’s executive director. “There were many vacancies on 40th Street 10 years ago, 15 years ago.” As the park developed, these vacancies created an opportunity for new retail and therefore, a new identity for the once-neglected green space.
In 1992, the BPC embarked on a comprehensive plan for Bryant Park, a 10-acre patch long known as “Needle Park” due to a reputation for high crime and drug traffic. According to BPC history, the nonprofit’s seven-year master plan included some $10 million toward grounds maintenance, public-serving programming and other “lifestyle” endeavors that helped reduce crime by 92%. Long gone are dealers and vagrants, replaced by folks attending those park summer movie nights or winter ice skating sessions.
Such varied-yet-consistent sources of foot traffic are much of what attracted Anthony Battaglia, CEO of Angelina Paris, to 1050 Sixth Ave. at the corner with West 40th Street. Prior to the pandemic, roughly 10,000 people passed by the spot each week, said Battaglia, a reliable customer base that gave him the confidence to open Angelina in November of 2020, despite the uncertainty of the COVID crisis.
“We have a strong story to sell, and we didn’t find, back then, something similar to our [French patisserie] concept,” said Battaglia, who previously worked at posh French chain Maison Kayser, which shuttered its West 40th Street location during the pandemic. With his background in food service, Battaglia knew that Angelina could differentiate itself from competitors as well as complement high-end neighboring retailers, such as Whole Foods.
There was also West 40th’s relatively optimal rent prices. Although precise numbers for West 40th Street’s “bakery row” are difficult to pinpoint, a 2025 CBRE first quarter report noted average asking rents on Fifth Avenue between 49th and 42nd Street hovered around $615 per square foot, compared to nearly $700 per square foot along Manhattan’s main retail corridors.
Price considerations were part of the reason Lou Ramirez, a managing partner at Heritage Grand Bakery, branched out on his own after working for years at Bryant Park-area bakeries like Maison Kayser and Le Pain Quotidien. Although Maison Kayser later folded its West 40th Street location, Ramirez’s Heritage Grand ultimately leased that same space — which makes sense. Locations that have previously held bakeries come ready-made with the ideal physical layouts — commercial kitchens, ample display cases, regulated ventilation systems — needed by similar tenants.
This is why so many bakeries can crop up so quickly in and around Bryant Park: The facilities are already in place, said Winograd.
“Businesses are always looking for any way that it can be favorable to . . . lowering their barrier to entry,” Winograd added. “One of the big ways they do that is look for spaces that were previously aligned with their business.”
Unlike Heritage Grand, Angelina moved into what was, at the time, a new building and had to build out everything from scratch — a process that proved time-intensive and costly. Angelina’s landlord, Garden Homes (via its New York affiliate Skyline Developers), wasn’t necessarily looking for a bakery tenant, said Battaglia. But building owners like what bakeries have to offer.
At the bare minimum, a bakery smells good, said Biederman. But more importantly, they incentivize employees to shop and dine right where they work — which helps lure lucrative office tenants above, explains Jonathan Resnick, president of Heritage’s landlord Jack Resnick and Sons. At the landlord’s request, Heritage Grand offered the building’s upstairs tenants a 10% discount on its products to help keep them from ever leaving.
Ground-floor amenities have become increasingly valuable in a post-pandemic world to entice workers back to their offices in traditional central business districts like Bryant Park. But the neighborhood’s character is changing, Battaglia says. Despite anchor towers by the likes of Salesforce and Bank of America, companies such as global banking giant HSBC have moved to newer business districts, like Hudson Yards. Meanwhile, employees at remaining neighboring offices tend to follow hybrid or remote schedules, reducing their foot traffic.
Businesses like Angelina have responded to these trends by opening new branches in the residential neighborhoods where hybrid workers now spend much of their time. Last year, for instance, Angelina debuted a site on the Upper West Side; the new location now records higher spending per customer numbers than its Midtown counterpart.
Changes in customer habits are just one aspect of Bryant Park’s ongoing commercial development. The al fresco restaurant Bryant Park Grill, for instance, has operated from behind the New York Public Library since 1995. Despite helping to herald Bryant Park’s rebirth, the Grill was unable to renew its lease and will shutter this spring, replaced by a new restaurant from celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
Five years after the arrival of COVID, the city’s commercial retail industry has mostly recovered — with rents surpassing $100 per square foot in key retail corridors, surpassing pre-pandemic levels. But keeping these figures rising requires foresight and planning, as Central Business Districts — such as Bryant Park and the Financial District — evolve into what Winograd refers to as Central Lifestyles Districts.
With more flexible, hybrid work models, “people 1745692394 look at their days wholly differently,” Winograd says. They want full-service, lifestyle-oriented neighborhoods — and bakeries are an ideal fit for this model. Cheap and quick, they offer WiFi-friendly space for meetings or Zooms, or meals and snacks for those who prefer to work outdoors in places like Bryant Park itself. Such shifts, in turn, continue to transform office hubs like Bryant Park into mixed-use neighborhoods with retailers targeting — and meeting — “24/7” customer demands.
Which is why, despite the already crowded market, business owners like Ramirez would jump at the chance to open even more bakeries on West 40th Street. Because for now, at least, he says, “competition is a good thing.”
