Like payphones, typewriter repair shops and middle-class housing, bookstores are a vanishing presence in New York City. In 1950, Manhattan had 386 bookstores, according to Gothamist; by 2015, the number was down to 106. Now, according to a count by the city’s best-known bookstore, the Strand, there are fewer than 80. Book Row, a stretch of Fourth Avenue between Union Square and Astor Place that once housed almost 50 used and antiquarian bookstores, now claims just one: Alabaster Bookshop at Fourth Avenue and 12th Street. (Plus the Strand, which relocated a block away in 1957.)
In literary New York, the closing of another bookstore elicits a sense of crisis – and sometimes emergency measures. In January, after the Drama Book Shop, a pillar of the city’s theatre community, announced it could no longer afford its rent, Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the play Hamilton, stepped in to purchase the shop along with three of his Hamilton collaborators. This was Miranda’s second intervention; in 2016 he led a crowdfunding campaign to support the store after a pipe burst and destroyed part of its inventory. The shop is currently closed while Miranda and his business partners seek a new, less expensive location.
Westsider Books, another stalwart of New York’s independent bookstores, also announced in January that it would likely close when its lease expired. In response, loyal customers flooded the shop with orders, and someone organised a crowdfunding campaign that has raised more than $50,000 (£38,600).
The Strand, the city’s largest independent bookstore, owns its building, which insulates it from some of the economic pressures faced by its peers. But when a city commission recently proposed landmarking the 11-storey Renaissance Revival building, it was cause for panic, not celebration. Owner Nancy Bass Wyden is lobbying against the proposal because she says it will make maintenance costs prohibitively expensive.
“I just want the city to leave me alone,” Wyden tells me. Her grandfather Fred Bass founded the store in 1927. Her father, who started working at the store when he was 13, saved for years to buy the property, she said, precisely to avoid the fate that befell the rest of Book Row.
“I have been told that I have no chance,” Wyden says, but she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t fight it. She could make more money renting the bookstore’s three-floor space to other commercial tenants but has no plans to do so, nor to sell the building. As landmarking only applies to physical architecture, a new status for the Strand wouldn’t protect it from becoming, in her words, a “bank or a Lululemon, like the Scribner building”.
Wyden and her supporters – including writers Gary Shteyngart and Fran Lebowitz and the graphic novelist Art Spiegelman – contested the landmarking proposal at a public hearing last month. In a statement, the landmarks commission said it will “continue to work” with Wyden to “address her concerns and ensure that this cultural institution endures”, adding that the commission “successfully regulates thousands of commercial buildings across the city and we are sympathetic and responsive to their needs.”
Contrast the Strand’s plight with Amazon, long the world’s largest online bookstore and now the world’s most valuable retailer: New York’s city and state government offered the tech giant $3bn in incentives and subsidies to build a new headquarters in Queens. (Amazon later made the surprise announcement that it was cancelling its New York move, after protests.)
Independent bookstores are getting squeezed from multiple directions, including competition from Amazon – whose massive purchasing power and low margins undercut brick-and-mortar operations – and consumer technology: ebooks, Kindles and tablets, and attention-stealing smartphones. Statistics on reading habits are famously difficult to parse, but the bad news is that yes, Americans do appear to be reading less. This is a long-term trend, dating from the arrival of television, and one that appears to accelerate with each generation.
Some sociologists believe that reading is becoming a minority, elite activity – the “province of a special ‘reading class’”, as the writer Caleb Crain put it in a 2007 New Yorker article – and that society is effectively returning to the situation before the advent of mass literacy. In a follow-up piece last year, Crain argued that the statistics continue to “paint a fairly grim picture of America’s reading habits”.
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. “Every time I step into a bookstore in the city, it is packed with people who are browsing and buying books. In a truly fair market, this would be sustaining success, but there is nothing fair about the current market.”
One of the causes of skyrocketing business rents is speculation: owners are forcing out tenants because buildings are sometimes more valuable empty. The goal is “to empty these buildings of rent-regulated residents and small businesses”, Moss says, so that they can be sold for profit or used as collateral with which to borrow money that is then invested elsewhere.
The most powerful solution, according to Moss, would be commercial rent control – a hard sell politically, he acknowledges, but one that was effective in curtailing predatory landlords in the city after the second world war. Other potential solutions, he says, include a “vacancy tax” on commercial spaces left deliberately empty; zoning to control the proliferation of chain stores; and the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, a bill that would give commercial tenants the option of 10-year lease renewals, as well as the right to request arbitration with landlords.
The legislation, first introduced in 1986, has struggled to gain traction. Proponents say it could end “rent gouging” and the practice of landlords illegally charging tenants extra rent under the table. Critics say the bill might not pass constitutional scrutiny and could discourage landlords from renting to small businesses.
It would be a sad turn of events if a city that has nurtured so many great writers – Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg and countless others – became a city without places to buy their books.
