Upper Manhattan's Disappearing Bodegas

Bodegas — there are around 12,000 in New York City — cannot be strictly defined," writes Tatiana Schlossberg for The New York Times. "You know one when you see it."

While 75 store closings this year is about .625 percent, a pattern is emerging. They disappear as chain stores open. And when they go, the Walk Score declines—one less destination to walk to in the neighborhood providing a variety of essential items.

Increasing rents may be the main factor as "it is the biggest expense for bodega owners, and in Manhattan, where limited commercial space creates fierce competition, the commercial rent ceiling keeps getting higher." And then there are the chains:

In 2014, the city experienced the largest increase in chain stores in four years, and the sixth straight year of growth in chains, bringing the tally to 7,473 throughout the city, according to a report from the Center for an Urban Future.

Schlossberg details the growth and closings of bodegas and chains in different neighborhoods in upper Manhattan.

"I see more Duane Reades and Rite Aids coming up everywhere, and the only difference between them and us is that they have a pharmacy," Ramon Murphy, president of the Bodega Association of the United States, said. 

"I go inside, they have yogurt, they have beer," he said. “I think to myself, This is a bodega."

In addition to rising rents and chain competition are changing neighborhood demographics, a kind way of saying gentrification.

"The neighborhood has changed; what people want has changed," Mr. Marte [a bodega owner] said on a recent weekday morning. "Lots of the people who used to live here couldn’t afford it anymore."

"There’s no denying that the texture of the city would be flattened if the idiosyncratic bodega became an endangered species," wrote Sarah Goodyear for CityLab in 2013. "Not so much because of what the stores sell as because of the larger role they play in the community."

Hat tip to Planetizen correspondent BSTANLEY.