Garden of Eden Grocery To Close After 26 Years at Union Square
Following declining sales after COVID, competition from retail grocery chains including Trader Joe’s coupled and a rent hike from the landlord, the 14th Street staple is slated to close on April 15.
| 07 Apr 2025 | 04:02
Garden of Eden, the Union Square-area grocery store staple will be closing its doors after more than two decades in the neighborhood.
Signs in the windows read ‘Thank you Union Square for 26 great years.” A placard out front says “Store Closing” and “20% off of everything.”
The closure comes after years of falling sales and revenue brought on by the COVID pandemic. Add to this a diminished neighborhood and vanishing clientele. Compounding these woes is the all-too-familiar issue of the building’s landlord raising the rent beyond what a business can afford.
”The landlord, the neighborhood, and especially since after COVID,” said John Coskun, the manager at Garden of Eden. Coskun has been at Garden for Eden for all twenty-six years. ‘The beginning was great! We had a good name. The location wasn’t so good, but we changed the neighborhood, actually.” The good times did not last, and in 2005, a Whole Foods opened up nearby, leading to twenty years of increasing competition. “Big competition,” said Hoskun. “That affected us.”
With the addition of two Trader Joe’s store, the competition ramped up all that much more. The lingering economic effects of COVID finally did the grocery store in.
“People aren’t coming into the office so much. We depend so much on the catering.” As it turns out, catering as grocery store like Garden of Eden, a so-called “Mom and Pop chain” is not sustainable.
”You see how many stores empty around us,” Coskun said, gesturing out the front windows. “Too many. Fifth Avenue, Fourteenth Street, wherever you go.”
Coskun confirmed that Garden of Eden does not plan to reopen anywhere else, citing the ownership not wishing to look at other spots for the storied grocery. However, he did not entirely rule it out in the future. “It depends on what kind of deal they can get,” he said.
A prior location in the Manhattan Valley closed last March after nearly twenty years in operation. A sister location, Eden Gourmet Marketplace, is still in operation. All of the posts by the Garden of Eden’s Instagram page now lists the location at 22nd Street and 3rd Avenue, in Gramercy, as the sole location.
Opened in February 2024, the 3rd Avenue grocery store is just a block away from its first ever store. That store, opened in 1994, was the very first Garden of Eden, founded by Mustafa Coskun. It operated in Gramercy until 2004, when the lease was up and the building’s owner sold the property to a developer.