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Joseph Bastianich, who has operated the successful restaurant Becco on Restaurant Row since 1991, plans to open a casual Italian bar called Frico at 43rd Street and Ninth Avenue, although Eighth Avenue would have been cheaper and has just as much foot traffic.
"Eighth Avenue is lost," he says. "Porn shops are creeping up."
If location is everything in real estate, then Eighth Avenue between 40th and 48th streets is prime space for porn-shop operators. Battered by the recession and lacking better options, landlords in the last several years leased space to porn shops of every description.
Tough on smut
But that choice will be foreclosed this week when the City Council will enact tough, new zoning rules sharply reducing the number of sex retailers allowed in any one area. Landlords, especially those on Eighth Avenue, will have to forgo the short-term gains sex-business retailers provide for still-uncertain prospects held by hard-to-get respectable tenants.
"The other side of this story is from the point of view of property owners in transitional neighborhoods like Times Square," says Jeffrey Katz, president of Sherwood Equities Inc., who owns numerous properties in the area. "These type of businesses are ideal in that they pay high rents and like short-term leases."
The pornography business in Times Square exploded in the early 1980s as the boom in home-video technology created a market for cheap videocassette purchases. In the Times Square area overall, the number of sex businesses, which had declined...