How bakeries are transforming Bryant Park

Few New York public spaces have seen such monumental turn-arounds quite like Bryant Park.What was once a Midtown Manhattan wasteland given over to derelicts and drug addicts has become one of the city’s most desirable commercial and entertainment destinations.

In the early aughts, bi-annual fashion weeks helped lure the cultural crowd — and newer arrivals like an annual summer film series and winter gift market now keep them there.And then there are bakeries — lots of them — more than half-a-dozen that have popped up in and around Bryant Park,  most notably along a stretch of West 40th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The success of these businesses reflects both the larger reinvention of Bryant Park and the commercial and retail evolution of Manhattan itself.

“West 40th Street has became a bakery product niche the way there are other [centralised retail] niches in New York,” said Dan Pisark, vice president for retail and amenities at Bryant Park Corporation (BPC). Groupings of businesses selling similar products to similar customers may seem counterintuitive from a profit perspective, but they’re actually a tried-and-true retail strategy, said Tyler Winograd, retail and consumer experiences studio director at architecture and design giant Gensler.Yet while neither commercial clusters nor bakeries are unique to Bryant Park, the concept “sort of hits you [here] in the face,” Winograd said.That “hit” stems from a roster of both longstanding and newer-to-the-neighborhood bakeries that mask Midtown’s often urban landscape.

West 40th’s six key pastry shops include Heritage Grand Bakery, Lady M Cake Boutique, Blue Bottle Coffee, Le Pain Quotidien, Danish bakery Ole and Steen and French patisserie Angelina Paris.There’s also Breads Bakery and Wafels and Dinges inside Bryant Park; the Starbucks around the corner on Sixth Avenue; and the five bakery-oriented kiosks in the park’s annual Winter Village.While the concentration of thes...