They’re on the right track.
More Long Islanders are flocking to Midtown East now than have in the past several years, thanks in part to the opening of the long-awaited transit connector known as East Side Access, linking the Long Island Rail Road with the new Grand Central Madison station.
The president of the Grand Central Partnership this week touted a spike in pedestrian traffic in the district, which spans 70 blocks between East 35th and East 54th streets and from Second to Fifth avenues—a notable chunk of which comes from those who hail from Nassau and Suffolk counties, he said.
“[Grand Central Madison] has had a significant impact on people with Long Island ZIP codes being in our district,” Alfred Cerullo told Crain’s on Wednesday.
The president of the Grand Central Partnership this week touted a spike in pedestrian traffic in the district, which spans 70 blocks between East 35th and East 54th streets and from Second to Fifth avenues—a notable chunk of which comes from those who hail from Nassau and Suffolk counties, he said.
“[Grand Central Madison] has had a significant impact on people with Long Island ZIP codes being in our district,” Alfred Cerullo told Crain’s on Wednesday.
Last year the Metropolitan Transportation Authority debuted Grand Central Madison, with full LIRR service beginning Feb. 27, 2023. Transit officials said at the time that the project, which ballooned in cost to $11.1 billion, would divert an estimated 45% of LIRR commuters from the overcrowded Penn Station to the new Grand Central stop.
And in the business improvement district surrounding Grand Central Terminal, at least, that reroute appears to be having a massive transformation. Pedestrians with ZIP codes from Long Island visited or roamed the area a whopping 115.5% more than they did in 2022 and 35.7% more than they did last year, according to data from Placer.ai, which analyzes mobile phone locations, and compiled by the Grand Central Partnership, which compared roughly the same six weeks between the end of January and the beginning of March in 2022, 2023 and 2024. In 2022, for example, 431,945 people with Long Island ZIP codes visited the district while 686,092 did in 2023, and 930,848 in 2024, according to data shared with Crain’s.
Midtown has been notoriously slow to recover from the pandemic, so the extra foot traffic is welcome, said Cerullo, whose district includes 76 million square feet of commercial, residential and retail building space. People on foot are the prime customer base for nearly every single category of retail, whether it’s restaurants or clothing stores, he said.
And at a Crain’s Power Breakfast in Midtown during a discussion with Editor-in-Chief Cory Schouten and other business improvement district leaders Tuesday morning, Cerullo pointed to two other trends that have been shifting the character of the otherwise nomadic neighborhood. Pedestrian counts at a pair of corners—one at Fifth Avenue and 38th Street and the other at Lexington Avenue and East 42nd Street—are also exceeding levels from 2019, at 119% and 104%, respectively. But what makes it even more noteworthy is that pedestrian counts on Saturdays and Sundays have actually been outperforming some weekdays, he said, calling the unexpected activity a “completely new phenomenon.”
It’s not clear what exactly is driving the increased traffic on those days, or at those locations, Cerullo said, but the new Grand Central Madison nearby and a recent revival in tourism benefiting the Empire State Building just blocks away likely aren’t hurting.
“It helps to change the dynamic of the neighborhood, from the typical Monday through Friday 9-to-5 to a more seven-days-a-week neighborhood for people and families,” he said.
Julianne Cuba , 2024-03-21 11:03:07
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