Another food hall — a once-hot amenity that some hoped could entice employees back to the office — has bitten the dust.
Citizens Market Hall, a two-level offering at the Brookfield Properties-owned Manhattan West project, will shut its doors in April and let go of all 68 employees, according to a state layoff filing made public Wednesday.
The hall, which features about a dozen eateries offering burgers, sushi and Spanish dishes in a 40,000-square-foot space at 5 Manhattan West, an office building also known as 450 W. 33rd St., had a short shelf life, opening only in 2021.
Initially the owner of Citizens and all its restaurants, which include Plant Nation, Casa Dani and Katsuya New York, was Creating Culinary Communities, or C3, a company founded in 2020 by Los Angeles hotel and nightlife entrepreneur Sam Nazarian. His C3 partners include national mall landlord Simon Property Group as well as Brookfield, according to a press release announcing the Citizens opening.
But Legends Hospitality, which operates concessions at Yankee Stadium and other sports venues around the country, joined the team in 2023, according to news reports.
Legends appears to be handling the layoffs, which will take place April 2, according to the filing, known as a worker adjustment and retraining notification. WARN notices are intended to give employees time to find new jobs before employers let them go.
Legends deferred comment to Brookfield spokeswoman Laura Montross, who said the developer was not giving up on food halls as a perk. In fact, she said Citizens is being closed to make way for a new concept akin to Hudson Eats, the food hall at Brookfield’s Financial District complex Brookfield Place.
Hudson Eats features stalls operated by different owners unlike Citizens, a single-owner model.
“While Citizens was performing reasonably well,” she said in an email, “we are excited to be launching a comprehensive redesign of the Manhattan West market hall space to introduce a new, modern experience.”
An upscale take on the classic mall food court, Citizens, which is tucked into a corridor near a Peloton studio and a Whole Foods Market off 10th Avenue, is not the only hall to have met its demise in recent months. In fact, the number of food halls citywide is now about 25, operators say, down from a peak of more than 30 pre-Covid.
Other casualties include Gotham West Market, a Gotham Org.-owned anchor of the Gotham West megadevelopment located about 10 blocks north, which closed last month after 11 years. Gotham declined to cite a reason for the closing of the 10,000-square-foot space, which was down from about 10 restaurants to five when it called it quits.
Meanwhile Williamsburg Food Hall, an 18-vendor offering, shut down in March 2023, and Market Line, a subterranean version at the Lower East Side’s Essex Crossing development, closed in April after five years.
Brookfield, backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, developed Manhattan West, a 7 million-square-foot mixed-use project with offices, apartments, shops and a hotel between West 31st and West 33rd streets, cost nearly $5 billion to build. Its last building, the office spire 2 Manhattan West, was completed about a year ago.
