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Why are New York’s bookstores disappearing?

11 points by howard941 8y ago

cafard 8y ago
Well, Travel Books (I think--it was close to Penn Station) closed a few years ago because the owners had reached the age that they wanted to retire. I don't know how hard, if at all, they looked for a buyer. I do hope that the Landmark Commission will get it through its collective head that the true landmark at The Strand is the all those shelves, and that literate and helpful staff.
smacktoward 8y ago
TL;DR: The rent is too damn high. > But the biggest culprit, at least in New York, is the same seemingly unstoppable force shuttering small businesses across the city: rising rent. Rent is a particular concern for bookstores because they operate on low margins but require large storage space. Bookstores “have weathered many economic challenges over the decades, but there is nothing they can do when the landlord triples or quadruples the rent, or simply refuses to renew the lease”, Jeremiah Moss, author of Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, tells me.
ratling 8y ago
Rich people don't spend enough on books and NYC is rapidly becoming nothing but rich people. Going to be awkward when no one is around who can do their laundry or run the McDonalds. Will we see the return of servants quarters?
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Rich people don't spend enough on books and NYC is rapidly becoming nothing but rich people. 1) As if poor places are bookstore heaves and e.g. working class suburbs are full of reading people? 2) Unless this is an American peculiarity, that wouldn't explain rich people in Zurich, Paris, London, Vienna, Dublin, etc, which read quite a lot historically. The kind of rich that don't read are some nouveaux-rich gaudy types.
  - ratling 8y ago
    This isn’t a bookstore problem in NYC/SanFran/etc. It’s an, “everything that needs not rich workers to function,” problem. COL has gotten so stupid that workers have to commute multiple hours to do modestly paid work (everything from cleaning to office work). Eventually it’s unsustainable. When you have to live so far out that transit costs exceed what you need to eat and have a roof over your head you look elsewhere (or a lot earlier than that if you can swing it). I’m seriously expecting company housing/servants quarters to become a thing again in some places. And for businesses to move elsewhere which is already happening. Probably not the big 5 but a whole lot of smaller entities.

11 points by howard941 8y ago

Well, Travel Books (I think--it was close to Penn Station) closed a few years ago because the owners had reached the age that they wanted to retire. I don't know how hard, if at all, they looked for a buyer. I do hope that the Landmark Commission will get it through its collective head that the true landmark at The Strand is the all those shelves, and that literate and helpful staff.

smacktoward 8y ago

TL;DR: The rent is too damn high. > But the biggest culprit, at least in New York, is the same seemingly unstoppable force shuttering small businesses across the city: rising rent. Rent is a particular concern for bookstores because they operate on low margins but require large storage space. Bookstores “have weathered many economic challenges over the decades, but there is nothing they can do when the landlord triples or quadruples the rent, or simply refuses to renew the lease”, Jeremiah Moss, author of Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, tells me.

ratling 8y ago

Rich people don't spend enough on books and NYC is rapidly becoming nothing but rich people. Going to be awkward when no one is around who can do their laundry or run the McDonalds. Will we see the return of servants quarters?

coldtea 8y ago
>Rich people don't spend enough on books and NYC is rapidly becoming nothing but rich people. 1) As if poor places are bookstore heaves and e.g. working class suburbs are full of reading people? 2) Unless this is an American peculiarity, that wouldn't explain rich people in Zurich, Paris, London, Vienna, Dublin, etc, which read quite a lot historically. The kind of rich that don't read are some nouveaux-rich gaudy types.
- ratling 8y ago
  This isn’t a bookstore problem in NYC/SanFran/etc. It’s an, “everything that needs not rich workers to function,” problem. COL has gotten so stupid that workers have to commute multiple hours to do modestly paid work (everything from cleaning to office work). Eventually it’s unsustainable. When you have to live so far out that transit costs exceed what you need to eat and have a roof over your head you look elsewhere (or a lot earlier than that if you can swing it). I’m seriously expecting company housing/servants quarters to become a thing again in some places. And for businesses to move elsewhere which is already happening. Probably not the big 5 but a whole lot of smaller entities.