Tribeca's Koh's Kids Closes After 31 Years on Greenwich Street

Koh’s Kids, the children’s clothing store that had anchored 311 Greenwich Street at Chambers Street for 31 years, has closed for good, Tribeca Citizen reported this week, noting a sign in the window confirming the shutdown. Grace Koh opened the store in 1995 and built it into a neighborhood fixture known for personal service before retiring in 2015 and selling the business to Jared Levine of Jamari International, an importer and distributor of high-end children’s fashion brands who kept it running for another decade.

Why it matters

City property records show the closure did not come from a landlord’s exit or a building sale, the pattern behind several other recent Tribeca and Manhattan retail closures. ACRIS’s document index for the ground-floor retail condominium unit at 311 Greenwich, held under Greenwich Reade Associates L.P. and its manager DG Equities, shows no deed has ever transferred the unit since the building, now known as Reade House Condominium, converted from a rental to condo ownership in 1988. The same ownership group has instead refinanced the space’s debt over time, most recently in February 2017, when it moved lending from Capital One, successor by merger to North Fork Bank, to Apple Bank for Savings. For a landlord that has held a Tribeca storefront for nearly four decades without selling, a Manhattan boutique’s closure at that address traces to retail economics and a changing children’s-wear market rather than a change in who owns the building.

The numbers

The 2017 refinancing recorded a $557,279.10 mortgage from Apple Bank for Savings on the retail unit, along with a separate $1.2 million agreement consolidating that debt with the unit’s existing balance, according to ACRIS’s real property master and parties records. Reade House Condominium, per NYC’s MapPLUTO dataset, sits on a 9,900-square-foot lot with 66,167 square feet of total building area, including 8,600 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, one of the largest retail footprints on this stretch of Greenwich Street. Koh’s Kids’ closure adds to a run of children’s retailers that have shut down in the area recently, including Baby Cottons, Jacadi, Livly and Polarn O. Pyret, a wave Tribeca Citizen has been tracking store by store.

What’s next

No new DOB filing has been logged for the vacated storefront as of this week, and no ACRIS document has recorded any change in the retail unit’s ownership or financing since the 2017 refinancing, meaning the space’s next tenant, if any, is not yet identified in city records. The closure lands the same week as Double Zero’s shutdown after 12 years in the East Village, another long-run New York retailer whose building also never changed hands, a reminder that a stable, unsold storefront is no guarantee a small business survives rising occupancy costs. Track more Tribeca and Lower Manhattan retail turnover at our New York market hub.