Was reading this in NYT today and thought some people would like an update on the store. It is the last 2 paragraphs. I saw the store when I was there. It is really nice, has anyone else seen it?
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...rssnyt&emc=rss
High Rents Chase Another Bookstore, This One From a Chain
By Sewell Chan
The demise of the independent bookstore is a lament often heard among New Yorkers — and the lament has gotten louder over the past year or so.
Last year, Coliseum Books, which opened at 57th Street and Broadway in 1974 and moved to West 42nd Street in 2002, filed for bankruptcy protection, then closed its doors for good. The same month that Coliseum Books closed, Murder Ink, a mystery bookstore on the Upper West Side, announced that it, too, was shutting down, a victim of high rents. The store’s owner, Jay Pearsall, wrote an elegy about the store’s demise.
Also last year, the owner of Gotham Book Mart, a literary landmark since 1920, fell behind on his rent after having been bailed out two years earlier. In May, under a court order, the contents of the store were auctioned off and the Gotham Book Mart closed permanently.
It may come as a surprise to know that high rents have been hurting the bookstore chains as well. Barnes & Noble has confirmed that it is closing its store on Astor Place on Dec. 31. The store, which opened in 1994, occupies 32,000 square feet on three floors.
“Essentially, we are closing the store because it makes business sense to,” said Mary Ellen Keating, a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman. “The sales simply didn’t justify the high rent. We’d love to stay, but unfortunately couldn’t work out the economics.”
Ms. Keating said that Barnes & Noble is opening a new store, at 270 Greenwich Street in TriBeCa, on Nov. 28, so the total number of Barnes & Noble stores will be unchanged. The chain presently has 16 stores in New York City, including nine in Manhattan.
Racked, a retail and shopping blog, which in April reported on the closing of the Astor Place Barnes & Noble, reported last week that the site will become a gym. In April, The Times reported that the bookstore was paying $1.15 million in rent each year to Lafayette-Astor Associates, the building’s owner.
The neighborhood, on the edge of the East Village, has become far more expensive in recent years, a trend captured by the opening of the Astor Place Tower, a 21-story condominium and commercial building,
At St. Mark’s Bookshop, an independent bookseller at 31 Third Avenue, which will mark its 30th anniversary in November, the news of the Astor Place store’s closing has not exactly been cause for celebration.
“It’s a different clientele; it’s a different market,” said Robert Contant, a co-owner of the bookshop. “They’re much more mass-culture-oriented. It’s the difference between a gourmet food stores and a big supermarket. We hope that someone who needs a quart of milk will come to us to buy it.”
The American Booksellers Association, a trade group of independent bookstores based in Tarrytown, N.Y., reports that its members operate 2,300 stores in the United States, down from about 4,700 in 1993. But not all the news is bad. The association announced that its members opened nearly 200 new stores in 2005 and 2006.
Meg Z. Smith, a spokeswoman for the association, pointed to McNally Robinson, an independent bookstore that opened in SoHo in 2004, as an example of a store that has managed to thrive in a tough business climate.
“You find the same problem in Los Angeles as in New York: rents are really, really high,” Ms. Smith said. “So it’s difficult to keep your head above water in a business where profit margins are already very narrow. The stores that have done well, like McNally Robinson in SoHo, have opened up with a really vibrant cafe, a smart selection of books, and really great nonbook items. Smart retailers are going to do well if they’re well-capitalized and if they do their homework.”
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