Highest Standards: Furthest DOWN-town

Step inside Highest Standards at 2 Coenties Slip, where a curated cannabis menu meets art, streetwear and downtown Manhattan history.

At the bottom of Manhattan, the streets stop behaving like Manhattan. The grid loosens. Stone Street kinks around corners. Broad Street runs into water. Helicopters skim the East River, ferries push toward Staten Island, and centuries-old brick buildings sit in the shadows of glass towers built for people who measure time in basis points.

At 2 Coenties Slip, Highest Standards has found the perfect address for a shop built around the idea that getting high can be an aesthetic decision. The FiDi flagship is also literally Manhattan’s furthest-downtown dispensary, planted below Wall Street near the island’s southern edge.

The Financial District flagship doesn’t read like a conventional dispensary. Supreme skate decks hang like art. Vintage Gucci smoking accessories share real estate with coffee-table books, design objects and pieces by contemporary artists. Roughly as much of the compact floor plan is given over to art, books, gifts and smoking accessories as to the actual product. The result lands somewhere between gallery, downtown design shop and very grown-up head shop—with a menu attached.

Highest Standards has also expanded into the Bronx, where its newer neighborhood location carries over the same visual language and curated approach while adapting the assortment to a different local audience. The team describes roughly 75 percent of the brands as consistent between the two stores, with the remaining mix tailored to each neighborhood.

That is not an accident. Managing Partners Eric Hammond & Jonathan Monk bring over two decades of combined cannabis industry experience spanning brand development and licensing, management consulting and retail operations.

“This is where art, cannabis and streetwear, all of those cultures collide. And in my opinion, those cultures build off of each other.”

That same curatorial logic carries into the menu. The team gives shelf space to smaller growers alongside larger names, with live product available to smell and inspect; like Mark Turk Farms.

“We really want to give a voice to the micro cultivators. Our team is a team full of connoisseurs,” Hammond says.

In other words, the Supreme decks aren’t camouflage for an afterthought of a menu.

The address makes the collision feel almost suspiciously perfect.

Coenties Slip is older than the United States. New York City archaeological records trace the public slip to the 1690s, when Jacobus van Cortlandt petitioned to create an inlet beside the old City Hall. By the eighteenth century, this waterfront was thick with markets, shipping and commerce. A few blocks away, Fraunces Tavern was already a political meeting place before the Revolution and later became the site of George Washington’s farewell to his officers in 1783.

Then, two centuries after merchants worked the waterfront, the Slip became an accidental incubator for American art. In the 1950s and ’60s, its cheap, half-abandoned sailmaking lofts drew Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney, Jack Youngerman and James Rosenquist. Andy Warhol shot a film there in 1964. The place sat physically and psychologically apart from the uptown art establishment—a strange, rough little edge of the city where artists could build an entirely new visual language.

That downtown DNA survived even as the creative center moved through SoHo and, later, the East Village. In the ’70s and ’80s, abandoned lofts, warehouses, streets, clubs and storefronts below 14th Street became laboratories for artists including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and a generation collapsing the distinctions between art, music, fashion and nightlife. Highest Standards isn’t pretending to resurrect that world; it just understands the value of occupying a piece of it.

“The whole space has been treated very much like a gallery,” Hammond says, walking past work by Brooklyn graffiti artist Adam Fu, Jonathan Adler wall pieces and a Shepard Fairey print. “To me it’s a multisensory experience. You walk in and you’re not just coming for the weed, you’re coming for the whole experience.”

Even the scent is curated: Le Labo Santal 33 is pumped through the store. It is a hilariously FiDi detail, but it works.

And the neighborhood gives it an audience with two radically different rhythms. Weekdays bring Wall Street, SEC and office regulars; weekends flip to tourists headed for Battery Park, the ferries and the Statue of Liberty. Hammond says Highest Standards is “the only dispensary south of Fulton Street,” giving the flagship a remarkable stretch of downtown essentially to itself.

More importantly, it feels like it belongs there.

In a city where too many retail concepts could be copy-pasted into any neighborhood, Highest Standards leans into the peculiar mythology of the blocks around it: old New York, high finance, waterfront grit, art-world ghosts, streetwear, luxury and vice all stacked on top of one another.

Furthest downtown, maybe, is exactly where New York’s Highest Standards should be.

Read more about Highest Standards in our current print edition found here!

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