"You could grab some coffee, some lunch, some gelato, and also buy your groceries for dinner."
That's how Lincoln Market's operations lead, Ayman Innab, described the food hall the grocer planned to build inside the old Lucky Strike bowling alley at 660 West 42nd Street. It's a good quote. It's also describing a store that, as of this month, still doesn't exist.
Several blocks east, a different grocer opened on schedule back in June and has been quietly ringing up groceries ever since, with almost none of the fanfare that greeted the Lincoln Market announcement. If you've been waiting for "the new grocery stores" on 42nd Street to arrive together, you've been waiting for something that was never going to happen. One store is open. One is still a construction site. The order matters more than you'd think.
The store that's actually open
ALDI opened its first central Manhattan location at 311 West 42nd Street on June 19, 2026, on the ground floor of The Ellery, the 32-story rental tower built by Taconic Partners and National Real Estate Advisors between 8th and 9th Avenues. The 25,000-square-foot store held a ribbon cutting that morning and has been operating on ALDI's usual model since: a smaller footprint than a typical supermarket, groceries displayed straight out of their shipping cartons, and prices built around the chain's everyday low-cost approach rather than a deli counter or floral department.
For a stretch of 42nd Street that sits at the edge of Times Square, this is the kind of opening that changes an errand more than it changes a mood. If your walk home from the C or E train at Port Authority already passes The Ellery, you now pass a grocery store too. That's not a small thing on a block where, until this summer, a quick stop for milk or eggs meant detouring several blocks in either direction.
What "late summer" actually meant
The other half of the story is the one that got more attention when it was first announced and less attention since. Silverstein Properties signed Lincoln Market to a 20-year lease at $60 per square foot back in December 2024, filling the 35,809-square-foot space at 660 West 42nd Street that Lucky Strike vacated in 2021. It's the ninth Lincoln Market location in New York City and by far the largest, built into the ground floor of River Place, a 921-unit tower with its own outdoor tennis courts and a 75-foot pool for residents upstairs.
The original timeline called for a late 2025 opening. That slipped. By this past June, the projection had moved to "late summer" 2026, with plans for a full food hall alongside the grocery floor, including a location of the viral favorite Pizza Loves Sauce and a satellite of Julietta's Gelato Cafe, which has a following at its Bleecker Street and Hoboken shops. Late summer has now come and gone. The most recent reporting on Lincoln Market's expansion, published this month as the chain opened a smaller store in Williamsburg, still describes the Hell's Kitchen flagship as under construction.
Here's the comparison side by side:
| ALDI (The Ellery) | Lincoln Market (River Place) | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 311 West 42nd Street | 660 West 42nd Street |
| Size | 25,000 sq ft | 35,809 sq ft |
| Lease signed | 2025 | December 2024 |
| Projected opening | 2026 | Late 2025, later "late summer" 2026 |
| Status as of September 2026 | Open since June 19 | Under construction |
Neither grocer did anything wrong here. Construction timelines on ground-floor retail in occupied residential towers slip constantly, and a 20-year lease is not a project anyone rushes. But if you've been telling yourself the neighborhood's grocery gap closed this summer, the honest answer is that it's half closed.
Why the gap sits differently on this block than most
Far west 42nd Street has been an odd stretch for a while. It sits past the density that makes most of Hell's Kitchen easy to feed yourself in, and until this year it had gone without a real grocery option since the bowling alley closed. That's a different problem than, say, running out of coffee on 9th Avenue, where you're never more than a block from an option.
9th Avenue is the part of the neighborhood that never had this problem. Poseidon Bakery has been making phyllo pastry by hand at 629 9th Avenue since 1923, still run by the same Anagnostou family, still turning out baklava, spinach pies, tiropites, and sesame cookies to residents who've been buying there for decades. Walk the stretch from the low 40s to the mid 50s and you pass Greek diners, Argentine steakhouses, Lebanese counters, Ethiopian kitchens, and Japanese ramen shops packed into a run of blocks that most of Manhattan can't match for range.
That contrast is the point. The 9th Avenue corridor solved its own food access problem generations ago, one small business at a time. The far west blocks near the river are trying to solve it with two large-format leases signed by national chains, and only one of those two leases has actually turned into a working store. If you live in the W40s closer to 11th and 12th Avenues, your grocery routine changed in June. If you live closer to 8th or 9th, it barely registered, because you never needed it to.
What actually changes this fall
Restaurant Row, the strip of theater-district blocks that's carried the name for generations, settles into its normal rhythm this time of year. Pre-theater diners start filling tables around 5pm, and the post-show crowd spills west from Broadway around 10:30pm looking for a late dinner or a nightcap. None of that shifted this summer and none of it will shift because of what's happening several blocks over on 42nd Street. It's a reminder that most of the neighborhood's daily texture runs on its own calendar, independent of whichever grocery chain is opening or delayed.
Down at the river, Hudson River Park's piers move out of their loudest summer programming as the weather turns, but the fixtures that make Pier 84 useful year round don't go anywhere. The boathouse, the dog run, the bike and kayak concessions, and the community garden with its compost drop off are staples of the pier regardless of season, and Manhattan Kayak Co still runs paddle programs out of Pier 84 for anyone who wants one. If you've been meaning to try a weekday lesson before work, autumn on the Hudson is a quieter, easier version of the same water.
The honest version of this fall's story on the far west side isn't "the neighborhood finally got its grocery stores." It's that one store opened, one didn't, and the gap between those two facts is worth knowing before you plan a Saturday errand run around a store that isn't ringing anyone up yet.
If you're weighing a move to Hell's Kitchen, or you already live here and are curious what a changing retail corridor like this one does to property values on the blocks it touches, the Steven Cohen Team tracks these shifts across Manhattan's West Side as closely as we track them in the co-op boardrooms we work in every week. Reach out for a private consultation, and we'll walk you through what's actually moving in this market, not just what's been announced.
