Wednesday, September 23, 2026 · No. 41 · Partly Sunny, high 67°F
A long-vacant stretch of East 86th Street finally has a next act: the old City Cinemas space has a signed lease, and the tenant is a grocery store with a downtown following. Also this Wednesday: a new pottery studio opens just south of the patch, Asphalt Green puts a date on its Halloween bash, and we set the record straight on three things from Tuesday's paper.
The Lead
Happier Grocery is taking the old City Cinemas space on East 86th Street
The former City Cinemas theater at 210 East 86th Street, between Second and Third avenues, has a tenant after sitting vacant since the movie house closed in 2019: Happier Grocery, the high-end market from SoHo, has signed a lease for roughly 20,500 square feet at the address, per The Real Deal and Commercial Observer. It would be the grocer's second New York location, after the Canal Street store it opened in 2023, and the trades put the targeted opening in the second half of 2027. Upper East Site, which calls the store 'posh, viral and highly curated,' and East Side Feed both carry the neighborhood angle: a marquee stretch of East 86th Street that has been dark since 2019 is getting a reason to turn its lights back on — though, as with a certain other supermarket across the street, the wait will be measured in seasons, not weeks.
via The Real Deal
Around the Neighborhood
Nearby: The Pottery Studio opens on First Avenue at 74th
A few blocks south of our patch, The Pottery Studio has opened at 1429 First Avenue, between 74th and 75th streets — a space Upper East Site, which toured it, describes as spanning four floors. The studio offers monthly classes and open practice hours, per its own site. For Yorkville parents hunting a rainy-Saturday activity, it is a short walk down First.
via Upper East Site
This Week
Mark the calendar: Asphalt Screams returns to East 90th Street Oct. 23
Asphalt Green's free annual Halloween bash, Asphalt Screams, runs Friday, Oct. 23, 2:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the East 90th Street campus, per Asphalt Green's own event page — costumes encouraged, activities for all ages, free admission. Community Board 8's calendar carries the event too. Nearer term, Saturday brings the free 7:30 p.m. Movies Under the Stars screening at Samuel Seabury Playground at 96th and Lexington, just west of our Third Avenue line, and Cooper Hewitt's drop-in sketching — details on our events page.
via Asphalt Green
Corrections
For the record: three items in Tuesday's paper
Tuesday's edition (#40), as first published — it was live on the site for roughly half an hour before a same-morning standards fix — carried three items that should not have run as they did. A Schools & Kids item presented U.S. News' statewide school rankings as new; we ran the same story, from the same source article, as a Lead item on Aug. 31, and the item was pulled. A listing item on 40 East End Avenue's Penthouse 15 repeated a listing we covered Sept. 19, off the same StreetEasy listing, without saying so; it was also pulled. And the history corner said the Third Avenue El 'finally' closed on May 12, 1955 — that date ended Manhattan service only; the Bronx remnant of the line ran until 1973. The corner was corrected the same morning. We regret all three.
via The Yorkville Ledger
Yorkville, Remembered
The Lead's address was once home to German Broadway's 15,000-square-foot ballroom
The block getting a grocery store was once the heart of 'German Broadway.' The Yorkville Casino at 210-214 East 86th Street — the same address in today's Lead — was a six-story clubhouse built 1904-06 for the Musical Mutual Protective Union, and its grand Tuxedo ballroom, one of two in the building, offered more than 15,000 square feet of floor space. It hosted the Deutsches Theatre, which the building's chroniclers describe as the only movie house in the city then showing German-language films. The hall has a darker documented chapter, too: starting in 1933 it hosted the pro-Nazi Friends of New Germany's weekly meetings, and by April 1938 it was drawing German American Bund rallies — a part of German Broadway's story as well.
source: Daytonian in Manhattan
Yorkville has always told time by what stood at 210 East 86th Street: a ballroom, then a movie house, and now — eventually — a produce aisle. The neighborhood's next era, it turns out, will be organized around groceries. There are worse ways to be remembered than as the block where everyone got dinner.