Rande Davis, Bob Gedaliah celebrate with the staff of Georgia & Aliou’s Bakery, one of the new stores in Turnstyle, under Columbus Circle.
By Jessica Brockington
A nondescript tunnel linking 57th Street to the 59th Street Columbus Circle subway stations has been gorgeously transformed into a little slice of NYC called “TurnStyle.” On Thursday afternoon, the venue opened with a block party: music, poetry and international cuisines of the area.
Curated by Susan Fine, a veteran of the Grand Central Terminal redevelopment of the 1990’s, TurnStyle offers commuters, tourists and neighbors a sleek place to enjoy some of the best of NYC.
With the exception of Starbucks, which anchors the corner nearest the subway turnstiles, you’ll find only a handful of standards. Among the surprises are Greyston Bakery, which bakes the brownies for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. This is Greyston’s only retail location and all proceeds help Greyston in their 33 year mission to combat homelessness.
Marc Tetro, the artist known for his charming dog cartoons, is selling high-spirited NYC souvenirs at his pop-up shop. It’s his only dedicated retail space.
Asked about the location, he said he was excited. “I had no preconceived ideas. I was completely open to it,” he said about the sleek, modern build-out.
And with Bolivian Llama Party, the Orapeza brothers, Alex, David and Patrick, are treating Manhattan to salteñas, an empanada-style delicacy from their hometown of Cochabamba.
Their mother was here for the opening. Was she proud? “I’m very proud of them,” she said.
There are also some UWS neighborhood favorites. Rande Davis and Robert Gedaliah, came down from 90th and Amsterdam to cheer on the opening of a second Tiny Treats Café called Georgia & Aliou’s Bakery.
“We have an account at Tiny Treats,” Davis said. “We get our coffee there every day.”
Initial reviews from commuters were also enthusiastic.
Kathy Karpinski and Stacey Lancaster work at the Kaufman Music Center on West 67th Street. They praised the artisanal foods selection.
A one-stop shop for breakfast, dog goodies, cosmetics, and award-winning chocolates as you leave the subway were all appealing, Lancaster said.
Robby Markose and Bob Emer work together at Samson Investment Partners.
“It’s great. This is really terrific,” Markose told us. “They’ve taken this unused space and turned it into something useful. It was an empty walkway.”
Nicole Dalyrample works at Mt. Sinai. She has been taking the 2 train from Brooklyn through the station every morning for 11 years. “Fabulous. I wasn’t expecting to see all of this,” she said. Her favorite? “So far, the juice bar [pressed juice].”
“What was here before was horrible. This is such a breath of fresh air. It’ll be great in the winter,” says Terry Davis, a neighbor of the area. “This is a destination.”
TurnStyle is most popular with the young office workers in the neighborhood. It was such a dismal space before, so here’s hoping that it does well.
Yeah, it’s really nice and a lot better than used to be. It’s terrific to be offered bottomless free samples, and i ate a lot of them. there was even free sushi!
But it’s still a tunnel. It was hot. Low ceilinged, painted white. “Gorgeous” and “sleek” it ain’t. There certainly is no physical transformation.
And I’ll bet that that ordinary tasting sushi will be priced too high for me. Forget about all those “gorgeous” and “sleek” chocolate offerings.
The puzzle is, who eats offerings like these and then runs through a subway station, or who is going to? Whole Foods is just around the corner and if you really want to eat, it’s no contest.
I hope the venture succeeds and like everything else, time will tell. It’s all fine by me. Personally, i think a station enhanced for buskers would please a lot of people, musicians included.
I couldn’t find it the other day – I wanted to visit someone who works in the Lush there, but I could not figure out what entrance to go in. She told me later that I should have gone down the escalator in front of Time Warner Center, but I gave up after going up and down the stairs three times with too many papers from work.
You might want to fact check – the 2 train does not stop at Columbus Circle!
Thumbs down still a dark dismal space
I hope the project is successful. It reminds me of the shops in Toronto that are underground which is very useful during the winter months.
It looks all clean and sparkly now, but with some subway station wear and tear, who knows. I also wonder about the ventilation, which was not great the morning I was there. The aromas stuck around a little too long. Hope they get that right. The design goes a long way toward transforming a dark hallway, hope it stands the test of time. It would be nice to see some lunch food, not just sweets and breakfast.