Top: The restaurant South West New York, on South End Avenue. Above: It will become a Treadwell Park like this one on the Upper East Side. Photos: Merchants Hospitality, Inc.
South West New York, Battery Park City’s long-established eatery at South End Avenue and Albany Street, is taking on a new, livelier—and sudsier—identity.
Owner Merchant Hospitality, Inc., has announced that it will be closing its Mexican-style restaurant at the end of this month and in March reopen it as a beer hall and restaurant called Treadwell Park. South West has been in business in Battery Park City since 1999.
Merchant Hospitality’s current Treadwell Park (slogan: “Undying passion for outstanding beer”) has been a popular Upper East Side destination since it opened a little more than a year ago, said the company’s co-owner Richard Cohn.
“We think there is nothing like that in Battery Park City and we want to expand that concept,” Cohn told the Trib in a telephone interview.
The reimagined restaurant will largely copy the Uptown original, which features 12 big-screen sports-programmed TVs, 80 draft and bottled beers, ping pong, pinball and free popcorn. Customers sit at long, communal picnic-style tables. Cohn insisted that it will not be a sports bar. “We don’t want to be a sports bar and I believe Treadwell has successfully walked that line where it’s sports friendly.”
“It’s not going to be a place that is designed for 20-somethings only to be there and drink a lot,” he noted, saying that unlike the Upper East Side establishment, there will be lunch and children’s menus.
The concept switch raised concerns among some at a meeting of Community Board 1’s Battery Park City Committee last week where Alexander Yellen, a Merchants Hospitality lawyer, presented the beer hall’s plan, The company, he said, hopes the establishment will attract more families than its Uptown model.
“Affordable restaurants for families doesn’t seem like it correlates with pinball, TV screens and people drinking,” said Barbara Ireland, who lives nearby at 300 Rector St.
“I do think ping pong is something that is very attractive to families,” Yellen replied.
“I would hope that the pinball and ping pong area is friendly enough that if families and kids are there they are not feeling like they’re standing at the bar with their kids playing pinball,” committee co-chair Tammy Meltzer said.
Cohn said South West’s business, though still profitable, has been hurt by competition from Hudson Eats and other new dining options at Brookfield Place. The completed underground connection between the World Trade Center and Brookfield Place has also kept more people indoors, especially in the winter.
"You need to have a destination type of concept that will get people to walk outside on cold days,” he said.
And, he noted, “Sometimes a particular concept might have run its course.”