Adding Insult To Injury: Hog Pit Barbecue To Be Replaced With Cheap Shoes

Watching a neighborhood change in Manhattan is an exercise in disappointment these days.
The Meatpacking District is about to lose two of its popular restaurants, Florent, about which we have written a great deal recently, and The Hog Pit. The popular barbecue joint will be turned into a Steve by Steve Madden shoe store come January when it is due to be displaced, predictably, by a rent hike.
There is a Steve store not far away on Bleecker Street, so it is a little surprising that Madden would choose to open another so nearby, but clearly the strategy is to burnish the image of a lower end product by placing it in a fashionable location. So far, The Meatpacking district has been moving upscale with designer stores, but could this development start an influx of more moderate chain stores? Hot Topic coming next?
WWD broke the news this morning in a brief article about the neighborhood, and suggested that it may be changing so fast that the elements that made appealing in the first place are being erased.
Well, we knew that. "What is the tipping point of a gentrifying neighborhood?" Sharon Edelson asks. "The answer depends on whom you talk to."
Breathless real estate executives are thrilled at the potential of the neighborhood, dismissing the beloved Florent as "history" and looking to the High Line Park renovation to bloat rents even further, naming the usual suspects, Bloomingdale's, Barneys and Ralph Lauren as furiously searching for space in the area. Polo spokespeople have now emphatically denied that they are interested in the area at all, which tells you how much to trust real estate executives. While The Hog Pit is not quite the institution that Florent is, at least it adds another dimension to the mix in the area, while Steve will add...another one of his cheap shoe stores.
Meatpacking District in Flux by Sharon Edelson (WWD)