Columbus Avenue Is Running On Two Different Clocks This Summer

Lucia Pizza opens on Columbus Avenue in about six weeks. Terra Developers closed on a building four blocks north for $28 million, and most people walking past it every day for groceries had no idea it was even for sale. Both of those things are happening on the same half mile of Columbus Avenue this August. They are not happening at the same speed.

Walk the avenue between 65th and 92nd Streets right now and you'll notice the fast clock first: a new slice shop, a bar getting bigger, a bowl shop nobody remembers seeing built. That's the layer most people talk about when they say a neighborhood is "changing." But underneath it, a slower and much larger set of decisions is playing out inside buildings that have looked exactly the same for decades. Reading Columbus Avenue only by its storefronts means missing most of the story.

The Storefronts You Can Watch Turn Over

The visible churn is real, and it's worth naming specifically because this is the layer that gets attention and the layer that tells you the least about where the avenue is headed.

• Lucia Pizza, the New York slice shop, is opening its first Upper West Side location at 159 Columbus Avenue, between West 67th and 68th Streets, with a target late-September opening near Lincoln Center. Founder Salvatore "Sal" Carlino and part-owner Dylan Schwartz have talked about wanting the counter staff to know regulars by name, the way the brand has built loyalty in its other neighborhoods.
• Tap, the gluten-free Brazilian spot at 267 Columbus Avenue, is expanding next door into 265 Columbus, growing its footprint by roughly 55 percent. Partner Pedro Uchoa says the build-out adds a lounge area, more seating, a Brazilian graffiti mural, and what he calls an "experiential restroom," something guests have apparently been asking for since day one.
• SoBol, the acai bowl and smoothie chain that started on Long Island in 2013 and now runs about 80 locations, more than 50 of them in New York State, opened its first Manhattan outpost at 550 Columbus Avenue, between 86th and 87th, in late January.

None of these openings required a permit fight, a community board hearing, or a zoning variance. A landlord signs a lease, a crew builds out a storefront, and a business opens on a timeline measured in months. This is the part of Columbus Avenue that's easy to see because it's designed to be seen. It's also the part that turns over fastest, which is exactly why it shouldn't be mistaken for the whole picture.

The Building Nobody Watched Change Hands

Four blocks north of where Lucia Pizza is building out, at 500 Columbus Avenue on the northwest corner of West 84th Street, a five-story building just sold for $28 million. Most residents know this address only as the Gristedes they've shopped at for years, the one with the laundromat and shoe repair shop tucked around the corner on 84th. What they likely didn't know is that the dozen apartments sitting above that supermarket have been vacant for 30 years.

The seller was CKMR Corporation, the entity that once ran Sloan's Supermarkets and has held onto the property since buying it in the 1970s. The buyer, Brooklyn-based Terra Developers, picked it up from a longtime owner sitting on decades of dead space above a working retail anchor. Bob Knakal and Jake Hulsh of BKREA represented CKMR on the sale, and Knakal has said the residential floors are well positioned for conversion into condominiums, with additional vertical expansion possible on the 10,217-square-foot corner lot. Terra financed the purchase with a $25 million loan arranged through Newmark. It's the same playbook the firm ran in 2024, when it paid $27.6 million for a redevelopment site in Long Island City.

Nobody protested this sale because nobody knew to. There was no filing to comment on, no rendering to react to, just a property records update showing a new owner. That's the quieter clock on Columbus Avenue: slower, invisible until the scaffolding goes up, and often already decided by the time residents notice.

Eight Blocks Of Shadow From One Corner Lot

The loudest clock on Columbus Avenue right now belongs to this one, because it did require a filing, and residents noticed immediately.

Extell Development has proposed an 86-story residential tower at 80 West 67th Street, on the corner of Columbus, the former site of the ABC television campus. Reports on the exact height differ slightly, ranging from 1,182 to 1,198 feet, but either figure would put the building about 275 feet shorter than the Empire State Building and would easily surpass the current tallest structure on the Upper West Side.

The proposed tower would stand nearly double the height of 200 Amsterdam Avenue, a building that drew its own share of criticism for scale when it went up. The filing itself includes a shadow study showing the new supertall would cast a shadow up Columbus Avenue for roughly eight blocks during winter months, which starting from a base at 67th Street puts the reach somewhere around West 75th. Residents commenting on the proposal have already pointed to what the existing 775-foot tower at 50 West 66th Street does on winter afternoons, describing a shadow long enough to reach across Sheep Meadow in Central Park, as a preview of what a building nearly 500 feet taller could do.

This is the version of change that generates comment threads and community board attention, because it's the one version of this story that residents actually get a say in.

The City Is Moving At A Slower, Smaller Scale Too

Not every civic decision on Columbus Avenue moves at supertall speed. Some of it moves at the pace of a single letter from a local official.

Earlier this year, the Department of Transportation announced it would install six new benches on Columbus Avenue between West 81st and 92nd Streets, following a request from City Council Member Gale Brewer on behalf of a senior resident who'd noticed the gap in public seating along that stretch.

"There is a large stretch from West 81st Street to West 92nd Street lacking public seating, aside from a bench on West 88th Street in front of the Phelps House Senior Building."

Manhattan Community District 7, which covers this stretch of the Upper West Side, has one of the highest concentrations of seniors citywide, which is the specific reason the request went in and the benches got approved within a couple of months.

Columbus Avenue also has its Open Streets programming back for the 2026 season, part of a citywide rollout of more than 150 locations announced by the DOT. The reaction along the avenue has been mixed, with some residents pointing to the benefit for pedestrians and local businesses along the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District corridor, and others raising concerns about bus route disruptions on a street that serves as a transit corridor. Neither side of that argument has won out, and both positions show up in the same comment sections every summer the program returns.

A Temple On Its Own Timeline

There's another clock running on Columbus Avenue, slower than all the others, and it belongs to a building most people walk past without registering as under construction at all.

The Manhattan New York Temple at 125 Columbus Avenue, on the northeast corner of West 65th Street, has been shrouded in scaffolding and black netting for months. Originally designed in 1976 by Schuman, Lichtenstein & Claman and redesigned in 2004 by Frank Fernandez, the 20,630-square-foot building owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is midway through an interior overhaul and facade replacement. Crews are covering the largely blank original exterior with Italian travertine marble and stained glass windows framed in gold-hued fins. The building's original corner steeple has already been removed, and it will be replaced with a taller, gilded spire topped by a 10-foot statue of the angel Moroni.

There's no lease term attached to a project like this, no opening date in six weeks the way there is for Lucia Pizza. It's a multi-year architectural commitment happening at the same address as everything else on this list, just running on a completely different schedule.

Different Speeds, Same Half Mile

A new pizza shop, a bigger bar, and a bowl chain's first Manhattan location tell you Columbus Avenue's retail mix is healthy and turning over. A $28 million sale of long-vacant apartments above a supermarket tells you something different: that capital is starting to price in decades of underused space in buildings residents assumed would never change. An 86-story filing and a six-bench request tell you that the avenue is being shaped at wildly different scales at the same time, one requiring a City Council letter and a two-month wait, the other requiring a Department of City Planning review that will play out over years. A temple quietly rebuilding its own facade in travertine and gold is a reminder that not everything on this street moves for a headline.

If you live along Columbus Avenue, you're already tracking at least one of these clocks. Most residents are only tracking one. The building above your Gristedes, the shadow that may reach your block in January, and the bench outside your building are all part of the same avenue moving at different speeds, and understanding all of them is the difference between reading the neighborhood and just reading its restaurant openings.

If you ever want to talk through what any of this, a sale, a filing, a rezoning question, actually means for your specific building or block, Fainna Kagan is always glad to schedule a private consultation.