The Real Estate: Bridget Read

The Tacky Weed Bodega Is Everywhere (for Now) What has the city’s Kush Rush wrought?

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IN MAY, A BUSINESS ENTITY called Convenience in Central Park Corporation registered an address in the ground-floor retail space at 200 Central Park South. Signage appeared to indicate the business would be selling tobacco, but the co-op board became convinced that at least one of the conveniences on offer would be weed. According to a lawsuit the board filed in August, such an enterprise, on the leafy stretch between the Plaza and Columbus Circle, would “detract from the dignity” of the address and violate zoning that bars any business “not in character with the district.”

If even Billionaires’ Row is fending off gray-market cannabis retailers, the city is truly experiencing a wave. In the year since recreational-marijuana possession and use were decriminalized in New York, it has started to feel as if the only new blood on any given pandemic-blighted retail block is a Blank Street Coffee or a place to buy weed and niche junk food. Because the city’s new Office of Cannabis Management has yet to distribute the licenses necessary for cannabis sales and neither regulators nor law enforcement is cracking down, these retailers operate in an exuberant but temporary state of semilawlessness. As one shop owner told me, “It’s Christmas.”