“Bleecker was never meant to be Fifth Avenue 2.0,” said Sara Fay, the vice president for marketing at Brookfield Properties. “We wanted brands with a social media following that they could leverage, and continue their engagement with.”

With the help of the creative strategy firm Skylight, Brookfield brought in Lingua Franca, Bonberi, Slightly Alabama (an online leather accessories label) and Prabal Gurung (the lone traditional fashion house) and worked out short-term lease agreements as well as revenue shares, the specifics of which remain undisclosed.

Hill House Home, a bedding and bath line that led the way, was not part of the Brookfield plan. The line opened its bricks-and-mortar space at 395 Bleecker Street just over a year ago on a leap of faith. Back then, the block was pretty bare, save for Magnolia Bakery and Bookmarc, the last vestige of Marc Jacobs’s six-shop empire.

“Almost everyone was like, ‘Don’t do this,’” said Nell Diamond, its founder. But she lived in the West Village and loved Bleecker Street, and in touring its vacant spaces she found that rents had dropped from their late-2000s high of $500 to $600 per square foot to $200 to $300. And despite the dire landscape, she did not believe retail was dead.