Walk down City Island Avenue on a Friday night in August and the contrast is hard to miss. Tables are full at Tony's Pier. There's a line outside Sammy's Fish Box. A few doors down, dark glass and a faded "for lease" sign sit where a shop used to be. Keep walking and you'll see the pattern repeat: a packed dining room, then a gap, then another packed dining room.
That's not random. It's the shape of a recovery that's happening in one part of the local economy and not the other, and the businesses running City Island right now know it well enough to be planning their fall calendar around it.
Two Restaurant Weeks, Different Math
City Island ran its first-ever standalone Restaurant Week from April 7 to April 12, 2026. The City Island Chamber of Commerce organized it with help from Flavors of NY, and fifteen locations signed on, spanning the Avenue's range from seafood houses to an Irish pub to Greek and Mediterranean kitchens. Chamber president Paul Klein put it plainly when the week launched: "We invite you to City Island for our first ever Restaurant Week."
Three months later, City Island restaurants also joined "Savor the Bronx," the borough-wide restaurant week run out of the Bronx Borough President's office, from July 6 to July 12, 2026. Eleven City Island restaurants took part that time.
| Event | Dates | Organized by | City Island locations |
|---|---|---|---|
| City Island Restaurant Week | April 7–12, 2026 | City Island Chamber of Commerce + Flavors of NY | 15 |
| Savor the Bronx | July 6–12, 2026 | Bronx Borough President's Office | 11 |
Set those two numbers side by side and something worth noticing shows up: the neighborhood's own event, built from scratch and run by people who work the Avenue every day, out-drew the citywide one that already had a marketing machine behind it. That's not a knock on Savor the Bronx. It's a sign that City Island's dining scene has enough pull on its own that it doesn't need a bigger umbrella to fill seats.
Who Actually Moved Into the Empty Storefronts
The clearest evidence of that pull showed up almost immediately after April's Restaurant Week. Greek restaurant The Silent Sea had been open barely a month when News 12 checked in that April, and owner Kemal Cobic said the crowd was already coming from well outside the neighborhood: "Lot of people from Westchester, New Rochelle, city too, Manhattan, Long Island."
The other new arrivals told a similar story, just without the seafood. Cozy Cove, a family-owned indoor play space, had opened less than two weeks before that same News 12 visit, giving parents a rainy-day option that didn't exist on the Avenue before. Lickety Split, the ice cream shop, reopened under new ownership after its storefront had sat empty for more than a year.
Here's the pattern across every one of those openings: a destination restaurant, a family gathering spot, a comfort-food reopening. None of them are the kind of shop you'd duck into on a random Tuesday errand. They're places people already plan to visit, which means they don't depend on the kind of steady foot traffic a boutique or a hardware store needs to survive.
That distinction matters because the vacancy numbers haven't disappeared, they've just moved to a different category of business. How many storefronts actually sit empty depends on who you ask. The City Island Chamber of Commerce put the figure at "more than a dozen" this spring. The civic group City Island Rising, campaigning separately for ferry access, counted more than 20 empty storefronts around the same time. Either number describes the same Avenue: restaurants filling in, retail still waiting.
Why the Chamber's Next Event Skips the Restaurants Entirely
If you want proof that the people running the Chamber see the same split, look at what they're planning next. Buried in the same April announcement about Restaurant Week is a line about a fall event called "Treasures of City Island," built specifically to spotlight the Avenue's non-restaurant shops. Details are still coming, but the intent is clear: the Chamber isn't running another food promotion because the food side doesn't need the help right now. It's the shops that do.
That's a small thing to notice, but it's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're actually watching what the neighborhood's own business organization does, not just what it says. The Chamber spent April celebrating fifteen restaurants. Its next move is aimed entirely at everyone else on the block.
The Ferry Fight Is the Same Argument in a Different Room
The retail lag on City Island Avenue and the long-running push for ferry service aren't two separate stories. They're the same problem seen from two directions.
Right now, getting to City Island means one road in, one road out, and the Bx29 bus. City Island Rising, the community group behind the ferry push, had gathered more than 2,000 signatures on its petition as of this spring, and members say the Economic Development Corporation has recently flagged the area as a possible future stop, though nothing formal has moved forward.
The case against a City Island ferry stop usually traces back to a 2019 feasibility study that projected low ridership. But as the Waterfront Alliance has pointed out, that study measured the island the way you'd measure a commuter town, counting weekday demand. City Island doesn't run on weekday demand. It runs on weekends, when it turns into a regional dining destination, which is exactly the pattern Kemal Cobic described watching happen at his own restaurant.
That gap between how the city studied the island and how the island actually functions is worth sitting with. The same weekend crowd that fills The Silent Sea and Tony's Pier is the crowd advocates say a ferry stop would multiply, and it's the same crowd that, once they're already here for dinner, could just as easily wander into a shop if there were more open ones to wander into. NYC Ferry system-wide isn't a niche service either. It carried over 7.4 million riders in 2024 and set a single-month ridership record of more than one million trips in August 2025 alone, according to Waterfront Alliance. City Island still isn't one of the stops.
What's Left on the Calendar
Two more dates round out the year, and both point at the retail side directly. The Chamber's "Treasures of City Island" event is still pending final details, but it's explicitly built around shops rather than restaurants. And the City Island Avenue Fall Arts & Crafts Festival is set for September 19 and 20, 2026, bringing more than 60 vendors selling painting, photography, jewelry, crochet, soaps, stained glass, and baked goods, according to the Bronx Tourism Council's calendar. It's a one-weekend answer to the same question the Chamber has been circling all year: how do you get people who already show up for dinner to also show up for a shopping bag.
None of this means the Avenue is struggling. It means two different parts of the same local economy are recovering on two different timelines, and the people running the businesses here know it well enough to plan around it rather than pretend it isn't happening. If you've lived on City Island through this year, you've probably felt the gap between a packed dining room and a dark storefront without having a name for it. Now you do.
If you're weighing a move to City Island, thinking about what a storefront on the Avenue might be worth to lease or buy, or just want a local read on where this neighborhood's next year is headed, The CS Organization knows the Bronx market block by block. Reach out to schedule a conversation.
