H Mart
Opened: May 31, 2024
Please pardon the Massachusetts interruption for today's selection of newsworthy posts! As I have mentioned, a lot is happening in the supermarket world right about now, so you can expect to continue seeing a lot of updates and special reports as I am able to get out and see the new stores. This H Mart, the fourth in Manhattan and the twelfth in New York City overall, opened at the very end of May in a tiny former Rite Aid space.
Produce is in the front right corner, with dairy and packaged prepared foods (not yet up and running at the time of my visit) in the rest of the first aisle. Meats line the back wall, with frozen on the left side of the store. The grocery aisles are split in half front-to-back.
In a few parts of the country, H Mart doesn't actually own and operate all their stores; instead, a few H Mart locations are independently owned but license the name from the chain. That's the case here in Manhattan, where the four H Marts are independently owned and not related to the other locations just outside Manhattan in Queens, on Long Island, in New Jersey, and in the rest of New York state. They don't run a circular, and the stores tend to be smaller with a slightly different decor package.
This is an impressive reuse of the former Rite Aid, as I'd estimate the store is probably around 6000-8000 square feet. An Upper East Side location in a former bank is set to open soon, also.
And they did a pretty good job of fitting the decor into the small space.
I don't believe there are any other dedicated Asian supermarkets on the Upper West Side, so this H Mart is likely to fill a need. (There is another H Mart in Morningside Heights at Broadway and 110, just south of the Columbia University campus. That's about 40 blocks north, though.) Just around the corner is the Morton Williams on Broadway between 68 and 69.
The grocery aisles are narrow and tall, with a lot packed into the small space.
And as we see here, frozen foods begin on the back wall and then continue down the last aisle.
The space is deeper than it is wide, so the grocery aisles are divided in half with a cut-through in the middle. I like the flooring here.
There's also a small selection of regular grocery items, such as the cereal you can see to the left below.
And the registers are set up as a counter running along the front wall, more similar to what you might see in a drugstore than a larger supermarket.
Opened: May 31, 2024
Owner: unknown
Previous Tenants: Rite Aid
Cooperative: none
Location: 210 Amsterdam Ave, Upper West Side, Manhattan, NY
Photographed: June 9, 2024
That's all for this H Mart, but we actually have another new supermarket in a former drugstore to tour today, along with a few updates across the Hudson in New Jersey. See it all here!
Or, for those of us outside of NYC, the equivalent of a store 40 miles away, maybe even in another state. One that would be rare to visit, if ever (aside from those looking to see what it looks like for sites like this ;).
ReplyDeleteExactly -- which is part of the reason this is so much fun for me! I get to visit all the cool places that are so close to me (or, if I'm traveling elsewhere, wherever I happen to be) and then I get to share it with all of you! It's fun to be a tour guide in that sense, to show things that I know and have seen.
DeleteMore specifically, New York City is a strange place. Someone over on RetailWatchers pointed out that the only mainstream big-chain supermarket in the city is Stop & Shop, which actually is true (sure, there are a few ShopRites, but those are independently owned; the seemingly millions of Key Foods and CTowns and what have you are all also independently owned; Trader Joe's, ALDI, Whole Foods, and LIDL all have a presence, but they're a bit more specialized). So it's so interesting to me to see the enormous variations in all the many, many different supermarkets across the city. The only other place I've ever been like that is Chicago, and even that has more of the Jewel-Osco and Mariano's presence than NYC.
That probably was true, but Wegmans changed that with the store on Astor Place (and one in Brooklyn), so that is a second chain within the city (though only those couple, and probably not too likely to add much more as those were kind of "lucky" spots to find that were large enough for them to work with).
DeleteMore, I was trying to find a good way to explain how different the distance is for those who are not (or haven't been or known someone who was) in a city area like NYC.
Being 20 blocks is approximately a mile, that means two stores two miles apart, which in 99+% of the country would be no distance at all, but in NYC it is just about as good as being in another state ;).
We used to do Scout hikes in Manhattan (including a couple times the end to end, from about 215th street or so where Broadway crosses into Manhattan to Battery Park), as being up here south of Albany it was a fairly easy spot to get to (drive and park by Van Cortlandt Park, take subway to start, hike, take subway back to cars) and good for the cooler seasons when regular hiking trails tend to be difficult to use with ice/snow at times.
The kids (being in a small town where we have one market, one drugstore, one McDonalds, one Dunkin and one Subway as the extent of chain stores, and when we first started doing these even some of those weren't here) would be amazed at how many of something (like McDonalds) they'd pass on that hike, thus the part of trying to explain how the city works, and that people are often not going more than a few blocks (above ground) from their work or home for things.