At which point a man and a woman walked up, hoping to grab a drink and a sandwich. Lowenstein turned them away, too. \u201cAw, no,\u201d said the man. \u201cSorry,\u201d said Ari, who\u2019d become used to such interactions in the few hours since he had taken to social media to announce he was abruptly closing the downtown location that has served as sandwich shop, coffee bar and gelato dispensary since May 2025.<\/p>\n
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This is what greeted Ari’s Pantry customers on July 15, when it closed without warning — well, to everyone but owner Ari Lowenstein.<\/p>\n
Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n
Ari\u2019s Pantry was also the central business district\u2019s lone purveyor of fresh fruits and vegetables, pastas and pasties, prepared meals, beer and wine, recipe cards and kitchen tools and shelves filled with specialty items and staples. I was a regular, as I\u2019d been when Royal Blue Grocery first opened in the space eight years ago; so, too, many of my colleagues. We\u2019d been in just the day before to grab lunch, a drink and a few snacks, and there\u2019d been no hint that it was last call.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThis decision was made more recently than you might think,\u201d Lowenstein said as family and staff began preparing to move product to his Oak Cliff and Cypress Waters locations. \u201cWe were looking at many ways to stay open. I was a passionate believer in downtown, and I still am. If I was a larger brand, I could look at this and say, \u2018How much can we afford to lose over the next three years?\u2019 But the dynamics here have changed.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u00a0meaning downtown, where World Cup crowds in recent weeks brought a vibe and vibrancy missing from Main Street most days. Here meaning the interaction of Main and Ervay streets, surrounded by \u2014 and towered over \u2014 buildings empty or close to.<\/p>\n Across\u00a0Ervay sits Neiman Marcus, which Saks Global will shutter at September\u2019s end<\/a>. Its future remains uncertain. Downtown real-estaters like to speculate about what\u2019s next; high-end apartments seem to be the consensus. Developer John Sughrue, founder of Dallas Art Fair, would like to see it become an exhibition space and fashion museum. Saks declined to comment for this column.<\/p>\n Lowenstein, who once lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, loved looking out his window and seeing Neiman\u2019s, whose workers and visitors were among Ari\u2019s customers. His first day in the grocery, he said, he looked out the window and thought, \u201cYou\u2019re fighting above your weight class,\u201d Lowenstein said.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Ari’s Pantry owner Ari Lowenstein took a break from packing up his downtown Dallas grocery store to discuss the factors that led to its sudden closure.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n On the other side of Ervay sits Comerica Bank Tower \u2014 until the name came off downtown\u2019s second-tallest skyscraper<\/a> in recent days, anyway. Its dwindling occupants, too, were regulars.<\/p>\n But above\u00a0Ari\u2019s sits the anchor that likely sunk it for good: the landmark Mercantile Bank Building, one of downtown\u2019s first office building conversions, now gutted after an October pipe break flooded most of its 31 stories down to the parking garage and sent its tenants scattering<\/a>. The Merc, too, has an uncertain future, no timeline for a rehab of the building its owners deemed \u201cuninhabitable.\u201d<\/p>\n Brookfield Partners didn\u2019t respond to calls about the\u00a0Merc\u2019s status, but its 213 units, once filled with customers who ran downstairs for coffee in the morning and lunch in the afternoon and dinner ingredients at night, sit empty. And the weight of all that nothing crushed Ari\u2019s for good.<\/p>\n \u201cThose were great customers, professionals who would come in and get some ingredients or people coming over in a rush to grab some stuff,\u201d Lowenstein said. \u201cIt might seem like, well, that\u2019s one customer, but that\u2019s one customer that was spending every single day every single week. That\u2019s a building block, and it was part of why we came here.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Main and\u00a0Ervay, where the Wilson Building also sits, used to be one of the busiest, most glamorous downtown destinations. Now, but blocks from the likewise departing AT&T, it\u2019s in the middle of all the bad news battering downtown of late.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no question\u00a0Ari\u2019s in the center of the storm,\u201d said Downtown Dallas Inc.\u2019s president and CEO, Jennifer Scripps, who often brought her kids to Ari\u2019s for gelato. \u201cThere\u2019s no storefront I am sadder to lose. We were blindsided by the news.\u201d But, she would say later, \u201cI am not going to say all is lost because we lost one store today.\u201d<\/p>\n There have seemingly been for-lease signs in the Continental Building\u2019s ground-floor windows since\u00a0the Commerce Street building reopened as apartments in 2009.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n I called her because of course I was going to call the woman tasked with looking on the bright side of the shadow hovering above the skyline. Where those of us who walk downtown every day see only the blank spaces, Scripps looks to the future and the promise and potential of the delayed convention center do-over and the $500-million makeover of the Dallas College El\u00a0Centro campus<\/a>, both years away from completion. I guess the visionary has to see beyond today\u2019s demolition debris and gloomy headlines.<\/p>\n Scripps and I discussed what downtown needs \u2014 retailers would be a start, I said for the millionth and one time, somewhere visitors can go without ordering an Uber. I recounted a run-in I had last year with DDI\u2019s economic development director, Doug Prude, who was showing a Whataburger rep around downtown. Prude asked what I thought downtown needed. \u201cEverything,\u201d I told him.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cWe have 16,000 residents and are working on a downtown plan, because there\u2019s no question that number needs to grow by a quantum factor,\u201d Scripps said. \u201cAnd incentives from the city will drive what you\u2019re talking about. \u2026 I don\u2019t want you to think we\u2019re putting all of our eggs into one basket, but the convention center is key, and the Dallas College campus could be bigger. But I think we need more bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2005, City Hall invested more than $600,000 in Urban Market on Jackson Street,\u00a0which failed after seven years<\/a> because there weren\u2019t enough residents to sustain a grocery store. Last year, Assistant City Manager Robin Bentley, in charge of economic development, told me the city had \u201ctried incentives with a few retailers, and, for one reason or another, they just haven\u2019t stuck.\u201d<\/p>\n Ari Lowenstein handed out recipe cards to customers so they could decide what to make \u2014 and learn how to make it.<\/p>\n Staff photo\/Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n DDI\u2019s latest annual report<\/a>, released in April, says there are more than 200 bars and restaurants downtown. But the nonprofit\u2019s website lists only 56 downtown retailers<\/a>, which include gift shops in the Dallas Museum of Art, the Morton H.\u00a0Meyerson Symphony Center and hotel lobbies. Twenty are in the Dallas Farmers Market, which is also included. On Main Street, there\u2019s a cannabis dispensary and a CVS. DDI\u2019s count also inclues seven 7-Elevens.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n It\u2019s not hard to find a vacant downtown storefront. Just work downtown and walk outside. In any direction. Data from real estate firm CoStar confirms that. Researchers there said via email that in the central business district submarket, \u201cretail vacancies are some of the highest in the Metroplex, pushing over 12%. Taking a look at how much of the CBD’s inventory is available for lease and it takes the top spot with an availability rate of 14.6%. Since the start of 2020, this rate has effectively doubled.\u201d<\/p>\n And it will jump even higher once\u00a0Neiman\u2019s closes.<\/p>\n Scripps said it\u2019s hard to pin down precisely how many vacant storefronts there are downtown \u2014 in part because some could be combined and many aren\u2019t \u201ctenant-ready,\u201d like the ground level of the DalPark garage wrapped in vinyl. That Commerce Street, Neiman\u2019s-facing space originally housed the American Savings Association; a few years back, DDI filled it with pop-ups at Christmas.<\/p>\n The Dallas Fish Market closed in the spring of 2020, though at the time, the downtown eatery said the closure would only be temporary. These colorful vinyls hide a lot of vacant spaces in downtown Dallas.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n Scripps said DDI\u2019s working with the city and landlords to get more spaces ready for tenants \u2014 and the city\u2019s working \u201con a toolkit for new incentives.\u201d Which comes too late for Lowenstein.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cAll of our tools are available for anyone who wants to talk about retail downtown,\u201d Bentley told me last year. \u201cBut I think it\u2019s more imperative that we focus on the building conversions and getting employers into those buildings, converting them into hotels and residential so that there are people to utilize that retail, and then it\u2019ll fill itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Lowenstein said he never heard from the city after the Merc\u2019s flood forced Ari\u2019s six-week closure (and $200,000 in estimated lost revenue); nor did he hear from the city after he reopened, when he had good enough reason to walk away no questions asked. But he said he spoke at a local real estate conference a few months back, where \u201cI talked about what we were doing and what our concept was and so on, and when I got off the stage, there were six towns waiting with business cards.\u201d<\/p>\n Any of them Dallas, I asked?<\/p>\n \u201cNo, but all the others are like, \u2018We\u2019re doing a thing, and we\u2019re interested.\u2019 \u2026 If you\u2019re not going to put in a big grocery store, you put in a boutique grocery. And we have some great conversations going with them.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, downtown\u2019s left with another hole. And I\u2019m left without one of my favorite go-to\u2019s. And I am not alone.<\/p>\n Thursday morning, a new sign was taped to\u00a0Ari\u2019s front door. This one was green, with a note that looked like it had been written by a child. It read, \u201cDon\u2019t go! We\u2019re going to miss you all very much. Thank you all for your kindness.\u201d It was signed \u201cMarcel, David and Adriana,\u201d and punctuated with a heart.<\/p>\n \u201cTo take the time to write that \u2026,\u201d\u00a0Lowenstein said. He signed. He paused. \u201cI wish it were up to me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Expletive, said the man in short pants and a golf shirt yanking on the locked downtown door a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,111,952,88574],"class_list":["post-376681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-real-estate","tag-retail","tag-tp-downtown-dallas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n
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