While the empty storefronts and clearance sale signs give West 8th Street the look of a retail corridor in distress, residents and real estate brokers say the strip is about to be reborn as an upscale destination for new dining options.

This spring, a new raw bar, Little Water Public House, will move into 59–61 W. 8th St., a space formerly occupied by a costume retailer, Funhouse. Nearby, the smokehouse eatery B.B.Q., which last autumn moved out of a space at University Place and East 8th Street because of rising rents, will reopen with a new menu at 23–25 W. 8th St., once the site of a shoe store, Le Mode.

The new tenants are arriving on the heels of the opening of nearly a half-dozen other restaurants and dessert shops within the last three months, including a Japanese grill, Cho-Cho, a sushi bar, Sushi Yawa, an Indian-style gourmet restaurant, Elatteria, and Insomnia Cookies. Those tenants join a growing list of upscale establishments to open on the block in the last year, such as the 8th Street Wine Cellar and a health food eatery, Eva’s.

All told, the new tenants — both those that have moved in and those that are on the verge of doing so — will reduce the number of retail vacancies to seven storefronts from a peak of 18 in May 2006, the executive director of the Village Alliance business improvement district, Honi Klein, said.

“Some of these spaces had been empty for upwards of two years,” a real estate agent at Buchbinder & Warren Realty Group, Gabe Whitman, said. “Now, all of a sudden, you’re seeing a record turnover in a few months.”

Previously dubbed “shoe city,” the West 8th Street retail corridor of novelty shops and footwear boutiques has languished for more than a decade as rising rents and competition from the nearby shopping district on 14th Street drove local merchants out of business. In the past two years, however, property owners along the stretch have quietly banded together with real estate brokers to lure higher-end tenants catering to the area’s increasingly affluent residents.

Now there are signs that a long-awaited retail revival is finally coming to fruition. “The street is absolutely coming back to life,” the co-president of the Washington Square-Lower Fifth Avenue Block Association, Gil Horowitz, said. “Within the next two years, you’ll to see a transformation that is remarkable.”

Some brokers have encouraged the block’s lingering shoe retailers to opt out of their leases, while offering lower rents to incoming, higher-end retailers in an effort to retain them. As the cachet of the street has improved, retail rents have risen to as much as $160 a square foot from $80 a square foot in 2006, the executive vice president of Square Foot Realty, Aaron Gavios, said.

“By now, all the major owners and realtors have rallied around this idea of bringing up the value of the block,” a partner at Massey Knakal Realty Services, James Nelson, said. “They’ve come up with all of these ways of being selective and essentially handpicking the restaurants and stores that they want.”