It looks bleak for high-end stores on Bleecker Street

New York

SOME day urban planners and retail executives may want to debrief Robert Sietsema. As someone who has lived at the corner of Bleecker and Perry streets for 27 years, he has witnessed the rise and fall of a luxury shopping district that grew out of workaday surroundings in the 1990s and has left empty storefronts in its wake.

Bleecker Street, as Mr Sietsema wryly noted, became "the epicentre of the designer-store revolution, whereby many of the old, functioning stores, like bodegas, laundromats and video stores, were replaced by shops selling US$400 T-shirts".