Sometimes chocolate just isn’t sweet enough.
The Chocolate Girl — a Seventh Avenue shop that sought that most oxymoronic place in the marketplace, gourmet kosher chocolate — has closed just shy of a year after opening, forced out because of a high rent.
“The foot traffic just isn’t there,” the shop’s proprietor, Tziporah Azigayil Jaeger, told The Brooklyn Paper.
The store was on Seventh Avenue between 11th and 12th streets in Park Slope, and — because Jaeger observes Jewish Sabbath laws — was closed on Friday evenings and Saturday, traditionally the busiest shopping times.
Last week, the store was dark and a sign on its window said it had been seized for non-payment of rent.
Jaeger said she was paying a “too expensive” $5,500 for 1,100 square feet, plus a 1,100-square-foot basement.
But her rent deal may have actually been a sweet one; South Slope rents are on the rise. An 850- to 1,000-square-foot storefront now rents for about $6,000 a month, said Maria Mackin, a broker at Betancourt Realty. Jaeger’s space could now fetch $6,000 to $6,500 a month, Mackin added.
Regardless, Jaeger thought she was being overcharged. “[My landlord] will never get that rent again,” she said.
Phone messages left with the landlord, Marla Walker, were not returned.
Chocolate Girl is not the only shop to shutter this summer. The Tea Lounge, long viewed as the precursor to the now-hip South Slope, will close at the end of July after a seven-year run at the corner of 10th Street. The other Tea Lounge location in Park Slope — on Union Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues — will remain open.
