433 Broadway (Google Maps)
Something arrived at the northwest corner of Broadway and Howard Street on Aug. 26 that comes with its own fragrance room, its own earplug collaboration, and a fan base that has been known to queue for five hours in other cities.
It is PleasingLand — the traveling retail experience built around Pleasing, the unisex beauty and lifestyle brand founded by Harry Styles.
The pop-up sits at 433 Broadway and runs through Sunday, Nov. 1, according to the SoHo Broadway Initiative, the business improvement district that covers the corridor.
Doors are open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m., and closed Mondays. There is one wrinkle worth knowing before you show up: the first hour of every day, 11 a.m. to 12 p.m., is reserved for American Express cardmembers. Amex is a partner on the project, and cardholders also get expedited entry and a gift with purchase, Pleasing says on its site.
Everyone else waits until noon.
The brand pitches the space as a sensory walk-through rather than a shop with racks.
“Touch, smell, and hear your way through a new portal into the world of Pleasing,” the company’s promotional copy reads, “by following your nose to the fragrance that fits you, touching your way through exclusive city apparel, and listening to the power of Loop Earplugs with the back-by-popular-demand Pleasing x Loop Discovery Room.”
Translated: a fragrance-matching section, apparel made specifically for this run and this city, and a returning collaboration room with Loop, the Belgian earplug company.
The building PleasingLand occupies is newer than almost anything around it, and the corner has a stranger history than the block lets on.
For roughly three decades, this spot held a small park with a hexagonal freestanding bank building at its center — commissioned by Franklin National Bank, designed by landscape architect Robert L. Zion and completed in 1967. Franklin National collapsed in 1974, and European American Bank held the space until 1996. For most of that stretch it was the only green space SoHo had.
It was also the site of a killing. In August 1979, a gunman shot and killed a teller there during a spree in which five New York City banks were robbed inside a single hour.
The building came down in 2002. The six-story structure standing there now was completed in 2015 by RKTB Architects for the coworking company Cubico — reportedly the first building in New York put up expressly and exclusively for coworking.
Ten years later, its ground floor is given over to perfume, apparel and earplugs until the first of November.
