I grew up in Brownsville, New York with a Rite Aid down the block, and it was there for every phase of my life. It was where we ran in for a last minute birthday card on the way to the party. It was where I stood in the pharmacy line for 30 minutes picking up everyone’s meds, because somebody in my family always had a prescription ready. It was where I went when I needed a sweet treat, and where I put together more last-minute holiday candy bags than I’d like to admit.
It wasn’t just a drugstore. It was infrastructure. Then it was gone.
It is not just one store. Over the past year and a half, Brooklyn has quietly lost a long list of pharmacies, and the question nobody is asking loudly enough is where people are supposed to get their medicine now.Â
When Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy for the second time in May 2025, it announced it would close all of its stores, including more than a dozen in Brooklyn. The list ran across the borough: Pitkin Avenue, Bedford Avenue, Fulton Street, Mill Avenue, Nostrand Avenue, Smith Street, Manhattan Avenue, and several along Third Avenue, Fourth Avenue, and Bay Parkway in southern Brooklyn.
Walgreens has been shrinking too. In June 2026, the Walgreens at 120 Court Street, the last one in Brooklyn Heights, closed after its landlord ended the lease. At the time, the Brooklyn Eagle counted 26 Walgreens and Duane Reade locations left in the entire borough. Some of those empty storefronts are not becoming pharmacies again. A former Rite Aid on Smith Street, near Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill, is set to become a Whole Foods.
But why is this happening? The short answer is money. Pharmacy groups point to low payments from pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen between insurers and drugmakers, as the biggest driver of closures. Staffing shortages and theft also play a role, along with years of opioid lawsuits against major chains.Â
This matters so much because when a pharmacy closes in a neighborhood with five others nearby, it is an inconvenience. When it closes in a neighborhood that already has few left, it is a health problem. Research from Boston University’s School of Public Health found that pharmacy access in American cities falls along segregated lines, and that race and ethnicity predict pharmacy deserts, leading to people skipping medications and ending up in the emergency room more often.Â
That gap is not new in New York. An older study found Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island had a fraction of the chain pharmacies per resident that Manhattan did. Think about who that distance actually affects: an older neighbor managing diabetes, a parent with a sick kid and no car, someone who relies on a bus that comes when it feels like it.Â
When a pharmacy closes, the official advice is simple: just transfer your prescription. As if that’s the hard part. In a working-class neighborhood, “just transfer your prescription” means asking people who are already stretched thin to find an extra hour, sometimes more, to travel somewhere new for medicine they used to get down the block. That hour comes out of a shift, a school pickup, or the one evening someone had to rest. Some people will make the trip. Some people will just go without. I don’t think the first step is a new app or another press release about “strategic closures.” I think the first step is noticing. Notice which neighborhoods lose their pharmacies first, and which ones get a Whole Foods in the empty space. Notice who’s waiting at the bus stop with a paper pharmacy bag. Once you see the pattern, it’s very hard to unsee.