THE COFFEE SHOP PAID ITS BACK RENT AND KILLED A BURGER CHAIN'S SIGNED LEASE

In March, Harlem Shake announced its first New York franchise location: 698 Manhattan Ave. at Norman Avenue, a corner storefront in Greenpoint with wraparound sidewalk seating, high ceilings, and a late summer opening on the calendar. There was one complication, and it was pouring espresso inside the space while the press release went out. Pueblo Querido, the Colombian coffee shop that has held that corner since 2021, was still open, still staffed, and, by its own account, had no idea the storefront had been leased to somebody else.

Seven months later the deal is dead, the coffee shop is staying, and the burger chain is moving to Williamsburg. The thing that flipped it was not a protest, a petition, or a zoning fight. It was a rent check.

Harlem Shake built its expansion the long way. Jelena Pasic opened the original at Lenox Avenue and West 124th Street in 2013, built it into a smash burger institution with a Park Slope second location, and started franchising. Cody Spearman, a finance professional living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, signed on in January 2026 as the third franchisee and went looking for his corner. "Greenpoint has a distinct personality that is creative, local, and proudly Brooklyn," Pasic said when the lease was announced. Brokers at Kassin Sabbagh Realty closed the 1,580 square foot deal at 698 Manhattan Ave.

The landlord on the other side of that deal was Josh Goldberg, an investor with 46 years in New York City real estate. His sitting tenant, Pueblo Querido, had struggled to pay rent through 2025, and Goldberg had a rent case running against the cafe. Per Crain's and Greenpointers, he read the situation the way most landlords would: the coffee shop could not afford to stay much longer, the space would clear, and a national-caliber burger brand was ready to take the keys. So he signed the next lease while the current tenant was still inside.

Pueblo Querido is not a placeholder tenant. Christian Guzman Herrera came up from Quindio, Colombia's coffee country, opened his first Greenpoint shop in 2016, and built a five-location roasting operation across North Brooklyn and Long Island City. The Manhattan Avenue shop opened in December 2021 in a storefront that had housed the same family liquor store for 35 years before it. The espresso machines, the tropical music, the hand-painted color on the walls: that corner is the brand.

When Greenpointers reported in March that Harlem Shake was coming to 698 Manhattan Ave., the shop's own team said they were unaware. The neighborhood found out their coffee shop was being replaced at roughly the same moment the coffee shop did. Regulars flooded the comments defending the business as part of their daily routine. None of that moved the deal. What moved the deal was arithmetic.

Guzman Herrera paid the unpaid rent and started paying on time. The court dismissed the rent lawsuit, Greenpointers reported on October 9. And Goldberg did something he says he has never done in 46 years of New York real estate: he reneged on a signed lease because his struggling tenant abruptly turned the finances around. Crain's put it plainly in its October 7 headline: Harlem Shake nixed its Greenpoint plans after Pueblo Querido paid up.

Harlem Shake is not wandering far. Spearman's franchise now lands at 153 Grand St., between Bedford and Berry in Williamsburg: 1,759 square feet, 32 seats, the Wall of Fame, self-order kiosks, a winter 2026 opening. More franchise locations are lined up for 2027 in Philadelphia, the Upper West Side, and India. The brand loses half a year and the corner it originally picked. The franchisee eats the delay. The coffee shop keeps its lease.

Strip the names out and look at what the market just told every operator in this city. A storefront with a paying history and a pending rent case can be marketed, negotiated, and signed to a new tenant while the current one is still serving customers, and the current one can find out from a blog. That is legal, it is common, and until October it was working exactly as designed at 698 Manhattan Ave.

It cuts the other way too. Spearman signed a lease on a space he did not have possession of, contingent on an eviction that had not happened. When the eviction evaporated, so did his deal, his timeline, and his corner. Incoming operators carry that risk every time possession depends on somebody else losing a court case. Ask who is inside the space right now. Ask what the lease is contingent on. Get the vacancy date in writing, with remedies if it slips.

And sit with the part of this story that should not read as a happy ending. The only thing that saved a ten-year, five-shop neighborhood business from losing its flagship corner was finding a lump of back rent in time. Pueblo Querido found it. The court case died, the landlord stayed, the burger chain moved on, and everyone shook hands. The hundreds of NYC operators who hit the same wall this year without that lump of cash got the other version of this story, and nobody wrote it up, because a space clearing out quietly is not news. A signed lease in this city is not the end of the fight for a storefront. It is the opening bid, and every operator should know which side of the bid they are standing on before they initial anything.