Ask a longtime Upper West Sider where Patsy's Pizzeria used to be and they can still point to it: 61 West 74th Street, half a block off Central Park West, under a sidewalk shed that had been up so long it started to feel like part of the building. The restaurant closed in January after 28 years on that corner. This past week, a lease finally got signed for the space. The new tenant isn't a pizzeria. It's a new restaurant from the couple behind Mermaid Inn, the seafood spot a block and a half north, and they're paying $130 a square foot for 2,300 feet plus a basement, according to Commercial Observer's reporting on the deal.

That single lease tells you more about what's actually happening to Upper West Side pizza than any list of openings and closings could. This year the neighborhood lost three restaurants that had each served pizza for a quarter century or more. So far, only one of those three spaces has a confirmed next tenant, and it isn't pizza at all. Meanwhile, the one pizza opening drawing real attention on the Upper West Side this year didn't move into any of the three vacated dining rooms. It took over a former Starbucks.

What closed, and when

Patsy's went first. The Upper West Side location opened around 1997, an outpost of a pizzeria that traces back to 1933 in East Harlem. When word got out in late December that the lease was ending, a manager told West Side Rag the reasoning plainly: "The lease is finished and everything is so expensive now." The restaurant served its last pies in January.

Francesco's Pizza went dark in early July after 27 years at 186 Columbus Avenue, between West 68th and 69th Streets. The family behind it traced its cooking back four generations, to a great-grandfather who opened a taverna in Borgetto, Sicily, in 1900. Workers in the doorway told iLoveTheUpperWestSide.com they didn't know what was coming next for the space.

Cheesy Pizza, a fixture on the corner of Broadway and West 100th Street since 1991, went dark three weeks later. The story got messier here. The landlord, E-House Realty & Management, disputed the tenant's claim that rent had been doubled, telling West Side Rag that Cheesy had actually missed several months of rent before leaving without notice. One reader in the comments did the math on the underlying numbers: average commercial rent on that stretch runs around $150 a square foot annually, so a genuine doubling would have put the corner at prices you'd expect near Times Square.

Three restaurants, three different landlords, three different sets of circumstances. The pattern isn't really about rent disputes. It's about what these places had in common before they closed.

The category that's disappearing

Patsy's, Francesco's, and Cheesy Pizza weren't slice shops in the strict sense. They were full-menu Italian-American restaurants that happened to serve pizza alongside pasta, salads, and in Patsy's case, branzino. You could sit down, order a pie for the table and a Caesar salad for someone who didn't want pizza, and nobody had to negotiate. That format, the neighborhood red-sauce joint with a pizza oven in back, is what's actually thinning out on the Upper West Side this year. Pizza itself isn't going anywhere. The restaurants built around serving everyone at the table something different are the ones losing their leases.

What's replacing that square footage tells the story from the other direction. At the old Patsy's, the incoming tenant is a restaurant from operators who already have a proven concept and a following a block and a half away. Nobody has announced what's coming to Francesco's old spot on Columbus Avenue or Cheesy's corner at 100th and Broadway. And the pizza brand actually expanding into the neighborhood this year, Lucia Pizza, isn't touching any of those three addresses. Lucia is a Brooklyn-born operation that expanded to SoHo, Gramercy, and the Upper East Side in January 2025 before targeting its first Upper West Side outpost at 159 Columbus Avenue, between West 67th and 68th Streets. That storefront was a Starbucks until last September, one of three Upper West Side locations the chain closed at the same time as part of a broader restructuring. Lucia does one thing there: pizza by the slice or pie, plus the sandwiches and salads that support a slice shop rather than compete with it. That's a coffee shop turning into a pizza shop, not one pizza restaurant handing its keys to another.

The slice that beat the world

If the full-menu model is what's fading, the specialist model is having a real moment, and the neighborhood's best proof of that predates any of this year's closings. In February, Time Out published its ranking of the 18 best pizzas in the world, and the top spot went to Mama's TOO! at 2750 Broadway, between West 105th and 106th Streets, for a Cacio e Pepe slice built with whipped mascarpone, aged mozzarella, Pecorino Romano, and Parmigiano Reggiano. West Side Rag had featured the same slice in its own weekly food column two days before the Time Out list ran.

Mama's TOO! isn't new. It opened in late 2017 and has spent years building a reputation before the global recognition arrived this year. Upside Pizza followed a similar script, opening its Upper West Side location in February 2025 with a sourdough crust built on a 72-hour fermentation process, a distinct enough approach that it now shows up on neighborhood best-of lists alongside Mama's TOO!.

The contrast is sharper than it looks at first. In a cartoon that ran on West Side Rag on May 1, one reader named their three favorite Upper West Side slices: Made in NY on 80th and Amsterdam, Marinara on 83rd and Amsterdam, and Francesco's on 68th and Columbus. Two months later, one of those three had permanently closed. That's how fast the ground can shift on a block where everyone assumes the neighborhood standby will simply always be there.

The debate got more pointed ten days after that. West Side Rag's next cartoon column, the "Mitchum Star Guide," handed out stars to Mama's TOO! and touched off the kind of disagreement that only decades of eating in the same three-block radius can produce. One longtime reader summed up the mood on an old favorite: "Sal and Carmine's definitely has lost its cache." Others jumped in for Marinara instead, and a few insisted there simply aren't any great slice shops left uptown at all.

Sal and Carmine's, for what it's worth, opened in 1959 on West 95th Street before relocating in 1987, and made the Pizza Hall of Fame in 2014. La Traviata has operated out of a small storefront on West 68th Street since the 1970s. These are not restaurants in danger of vanishing overnight. But the argument itself, unresolved and ongoing in the comments of a local news site, is the clearest evidence that residents are actively renegotiating what counts as the neighborhood's best slice at the exact moment three of its longest-running full-menu options have disappeared.

What this actually adds up to

None of this means the Upper West Side is losing its pizza identity. If anything, the opposite is true: a neighborhood slice just got named the best in the world, and a well-regarded Brooklyn operator picked Columbus Avenue for its fifth location in the city. What's changing is the format. The full-service, sit-down, order-anything-off-the-menu pizza restaurant that also served your grandmother's chicken parmigiana is being priced out by rents that a narrower, higher-volume, single-purpose slice shop can absorb more easily, or by operators with an existing local following who can afford to try something that isn't pizza at all.

For anyone who's spent years treating Patsy's, Francesco's, or Cheesy as the default answer to "where should we eat tonight," the answer to that question just got more specific. It's Lucia for a slice on your way through Lincoln Square, Mama's TOO! if you're willing to walk up to 105th Street for the one everyone's talking about, or whatever Danny Abrams and his partners end up calling the restaurant that takes over 61 West 74th Street.

Reading a block's turnover this closely, watching what actually replaces what and at what price per square foot, is the same instinct that goes into pricing a listing correctly or knowing which building on a block is worth a second look. If you're thinking about where that kind of read applies to your own plans on the Upper West Side, Brandon Mason NY is a good place to start that conversation. Schedule a Market Strategy Call whenever you're ready.