Cafes, restaurants and independent retail stores at Columbus Circle subway station. | Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin

Marketplace under Columbus Circle brings business to subway concourse By EMILY JULIA ROCHE | 08/02/16 07:05 PM EDT

In the passageways beneath the bustling transportation hub at Columbus Circle, commuters can find dozens of new cafes, restaurants and independent retail stores located between the train tracks and the street.

At a tour led by the Urban Land Institute New York's Women's Leadership Initiative on Tuesday, architect Marta Sanders described the vision of the project, named TurnStyle, as creating a “vibrant public space that is commercially viable.” Sanders said that the idea was “not to bring more people in, but to bring them in for different reasons and make them stay a little longer.”

TurnStyle is the city’s first privately funded underground marketplace, filling a 325-foot-long concourse with 39 individual storefronts. The project began in 2012 when the MTA sent out a request for applications to develop the 110-year-old corridor. Susan Fine, president of Oases Real Estate, submitted the winning proposal to reinvigorate a stretch that “looked worse than the rest of the subway.”

Despite the prevalence of retail in Grand Central, not to mention the Santiago Calatrava-designed retail hub at the World Trade Center and the Fulton Center complex, Sanders insisted that the new market’s relative size and location within an actual subway concourse differentiate it from other transit-center markets.

In 2015, the MTA ranked Columbus Circle as the seventh most used subway station in the five boroughs, with a ridership of over 23 million passengers that year, and about 90,000 passengers a day.

Inspirations for the hub included similar projects in transportation corridors in Seoul and Tokyo, as well as Grand Central Station.

Fine called TurnStyle, which is being operated under a 30-year master lease from the MTA, a “public-private partnership.”

TurnStyle features 20 food and drink destinations, ranging from Starbucks and Fika Espresso to locally-sourced health restaurants, such as Ellary’s Greens and Blossom Du Jour, and 19 retail storefronts.

The leases of each store are between one and 10 years long, with the duration of each lease staggered to allow for a rotation of new businesses.