Dozens of people stopped at the shrine before sighing and then walking on. One person in a black dress and holding a black umbrella gave a 30-second farewell toast before disappearing into the evening. Another started tearing up as she read the notes on the shrine. Passers-by hugged one another.
It wasn’t a funeral; it was a “celebration of life,” according to the anonymous organizers — for the R.E.I. store. It had occupied a historic building in New York’s SoHo neighborhood for 15 years before closing its doors for good on Thursday night. In another city, perhaps, it might not have been a long run, but in a neighborhood with high business turnover, the company’s sole location in the city became somewhat of a landmark.
“I’ve been living in New York for 20 years now, so I remember the time before R.E.I. and the time after R.E.I.,” said Chaiwen Chou, 43, who had stopped by the store to take some last photos of it and leave a message at the shrine. “It just so happened that when I started getting outdoors more was around the same time that R.E.I. opened,” she said.
“I’m going to miss it,” she added. “It feels like the end of an era.”
Ever since the flagship retailer for outdoor gear moved into three stories of the Puck Building in 2011, it remained an unchanging space amid the rapidly changing downtown neighborhood. Its facade would help orient New Yorkers who emerged from the train station discombobulated, and passers-by found in it an accessible, clean bathroom. It served as a heated oasis on cold days and a cool-down spot to fill up water bottles on hot ones.
The store will also be remembered as a rare doorway to the great outdoors in the middle of an urban jungle, a one-stop shop for hiking boots and tents.
When R.E.I. announced its decision to shutter the SoHo location in October, along with the closure of Boston’s sole storefront and a store in Paramus, N.J., it didn’t provide details. A representative cited a “need to adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs” in an email, but would not elaborate.
After an early pandemic outdoor-gear boom, the company has been clawing its way out of several years of losses. Its new chief executive has focused on cutting overhead costs and halting expansions and R.E.I. posted two profitable quarters last year.
Rising rents in the SoHo neighborhood have led to a revolving door of commercial tenants in recent years. The average retail rent for the neighborhood hovered around $351 per square foot in 2025, up by 9 percent from the year before, according to a report by JLL, a real estate company. Kushner Companies, the building’s landlord, did not respond to requests for comment.
Days before the store’s closure, an anonymous user created an event on the event invitation app Partiful called the SOHO REI funeral.
The invite instructed New Yorkers to gather outside the store, wear black and give it the “send-off she deserves.” There would be speeches and musical performances.
Within hours, hundreds of people said they were going to the party, which would have clogged the triangular convergence of Lafayette and Mulberry Streets. The organizers decided to pivot to an all-day shrine where people could stop by.
On Thursday morning, to the right of the entrance on Lafayette, a placard for farewell messages appeared, with a bag of notecards, marker and tape.
“Once went on a first date here because a guy had to pee,” read one unsigned note.
“Thank you for guiding me when I don’t know if I’m north/east/south/west once I exit the F train,” read a card written by someone who went by Uno.
Katrina Rili, the mourner who teared up reading the notes, went inside and walked out with a new hat.
Dennis Porto, an R.E.I. member who lives down the street, came in with his girlfriend to take it all in one last time.
The R.E.I. era is a relatively new one in the long history of the red-brick, Romanesque-Revival-style Puck Building, which was constructed in the 1880s. Its arched windows and tiara of crenelations predated even Lafayette Street and the underground subway, said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation.
From 1887 to 1918, the building housed the country’s first satirical political magazine, Puck, which was named after the Shakespearean fairy, and roughly 30 lithographic printing presses. Two gilded statues of the mischievous character decorate the facade, looking down at the street below while holding a pen, a mirror and a book inscribed with “What Fools These Mortals Be.” Many of the original lithography stones hang in the R.E.I. store’s space.
Over the last roughly 140 years, the building has been through many twists: It was briefly an artist’s cooperative before it was sold to the Kushner family, which still owns it. It was also featured in the popular sitcom “Will and Grace.” In 2013, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump, started turning the top two floors and the roof space into luxury penthouses.
In 2022, employees of the SoHo store were the first of the company’s nearly 200 locations to vote to unionize.
“There was some level of hope that R.E.I. would listen because of its image” as a progressive company, Elio Alexander, a worker at the store and a representative of the union’s bargaining committee, said. The company was founded by a group of friends in 1938 as a consumer cooperative owned by millions of its customers and workers who buy memberships.
In the four years since the unionization vote, however, the company and the workers could not agree on a new contract, Alexander, 29, said. The jobs of all 72 workers at the store will be cut. The company has denied that the closures are related to the unionization effort.
During the store’s last few hours of operation, the mood inside was somber. Staff members, who said they were not allowed to talk to the media, expressed disappointment with a company that had otherwise been a fun and fulfilling place to work.
Benji Kalmanowitz, 26, and R.J. Tabachnick, 28, stood outside, dressed in black because they were in mourning. They met while working at the store in 2021 and became roommates, going hiking and biking together. Tabachnick bought his first bike at this store.
The company “represents a movement of getting outside and being active in the world, and having it in New York, one of the biggest cities, is such a statement and has an impact,” Tabachnick said. “The fact that it’s closing kind of takes that away.”
Exactly five seconds before the clock struck 8 p.m., or closing time, on Thursday, Colin Herron, dressed in an olive green vest, grabbed a microphone and started counting down.
“5, 4, 3, 2, 1!” he yelled. Applause and cheers erupted around him.
Herron, who worked there for three years, hugged the rest of the staff members.
After the countdown, just before the doors closed, Porto kissed his girlfriend, laying claim to the last ever kiss to occur at the SoHo R.E.I.
Outside, the shrine was beginning to buckle under the weight of all the notes it had accumulated.
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