The cooperative outdoor-gear chain's only NYC location shuttered July 23 after 15 years at 295 Lafayette Street, ending the city's sole REI footprint and putting 72 unionized employees out of work.

The cooperative outdoor-gear chain REI closed its 35,000-square-foot SoHo flagship on July 23, ending a 15-year run on the ground floors of the Puck Building at 295 Lafayette Street and East Houston. The store — REI's only location in the five boroughs — laid off its 72 employees when the doors closed, taking with it the city's sole outpost of the Washington-based co-op.

Those 72 workers were not ordinary retail employees by current standards: the SoHo location was one of 11 REI stores to have unionized in recent years. The July 23 date was disclosed in a Department of Labor filing that Crain's New York Business first picked up in May. The REI union had flagged the wave early, calling on co-op members to boycott REI's Memorial Day sale as the company finalized the shutdown.

REI announced the closure last October alongside the planned shuttering of locations in Paramus, N.J., and Boston, offering only that "markets and customer needs evolve" and the company must adapt "to position the co-op for long-term success." Earlier in 2025 the co-op had already laid off more than 400 workers and wound down its Experiences division, which had run guided day tours and skills classes.

The SoHo space opened in 2011, designed by the architecture firm Callison to work with the Puck Building's bones — exposed 1890s brick, a pair of restored original chandeliers, wood repurposed from the structure itself repurposed for counters and displays. For 15 years it filled three floors with camping tents, climbing shoes, ski gear, and, as Curbed noted in its coverage of the final days, a reliably maintained public restroom on one of lower Manhattan's busiest corners.

As of Wednesday, no successor tenant for the 35,000-square-foot retail footprint had been announced. The building has been drawing large office tenants to its upper floors: Curbed, reporting from inside the store in its closing week, noted that OpenAI now occupies 90,000 square feet above. The arithmetic of that transition is straightforward — 72 union retail jobs out, a tech company's office campus in — and the question of what arrives next in REI's footprint will say something specific about what the Puck Building's ground floors are for.

The store sat in Community Board 2 Manhattan. Its owners have said nothing publicly about what fills the space.