Numlock Sunday: Jordyn Holman on Manhattan department stores and Champion

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Jordyn Holman of Bloomberg who wrote “Manhattan’s Newest Flagship Department Stores Are Ignoring the Retail Apocalypse,” a fascinating story with some really wonderful interactive data viz. Here's what I wrote about it:

2019 is the largest upheaval in the Manhattan department store scene in years, an unprecedented moment in retail when over 800,000 square feet of department stores are closing, nearly 500,000 square feet are opening. Longtime staples are closing down while longtime outsiders are setting foot on Manhattan bedrock for the first time. There are 30 department stores in Manhattan with roughly 6 million square feet of selling space, and these flagship operations are huge for the retail space. Bloomingdale’s on 59th Street alone accounts fo…