Jake’s Dilemma to shut in October as Upper West Side loses longtime businesses

After 32 years on Amsterdam Avenue, the sports bar Jake’s Dilemma will shut its doors in October. The bar recently announced that its lease is gone, making it the latest in a run of longtime Upper West Side businesses to call it quits.

Michael Staff has worked there for years and is now managing partner of both Jake’s Dilemma and the Gin Mill, its sibling bar several doors down. He said the crowd has always been mixed. Students showed up to watch college football. Fathers unwound with a drink after hours spent at the children’s museum around the corner. Neighbors dropped in hoping to run into someone they knew. “It’s like losing a limb,” Staff said.

Upper West Side store closures pile up

In recent months, five or more of the neighborhood’s longtime businesses have said they are closing. The list includes Barzini’s, the Broadway grocery, and Good Enough to Eat on Columbus Avenue, a restaurant long known for lines that wrapped outside the building.

Parts of the Upper West Side rank high in a city comptroller’s report for what it calls deep, structural vacancies, meaning storefronts left empty for long periods. Across the five boroughs, the report finds that nearly 12,700 spaces home to a small business in 2020 now stand empty, while 10,700 storefronts that sat vacant in 2019 now hold new small businesses. Before any intervention, the report says, policymakers should understand what causes vacancies, how long they last and how they play out in individual neighborhoods.

What the Storefront Bill of Rights would require

One proposed remedy before the City Council is the Storefront Bill of Rights, sponsored by Council Member Gale Brewer, whose district covers a large part of the neighborhood. It would make a written lease mandatory for storefront tenancies running longer than a year. Brewer said she has come across many business owners with only a handshake agreement, leaving them nothing to fight with when rent climbs 500%.

The bill would also require leases to be translated into languages other than English and to include relevant details about the building. A further provision would give commercial tenants the option to renew automatically for up to one year, with any rent increase capped at 10%. “It’s very, very difficult running a small business,” Brewer said, calling small businesses “the DNA of our neighborhood.”