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Comment by samspenc | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing the problem - as with most small retail stores in Manhattan - is rising rent. Ironically, that is resulting in plenty of retail vacancies.

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I have a hard time believing that this is the main problem. I used to live near the mentioned St. Marks Bookstore and visited it several times a month. I moved before it closed in 2016, but I remember what it was like when it was fighting hard via crowdfunding [0] to stay alive. Even at that critical time, the place felt like a ghost town. Yes, high rent was a factor, but only because it didn't seem to get much business as Amazon/Kindle continued to grow.

From the article:

> That extends to its bookshops, many of which have fallen to astronomically rising rents. St Mark’s Bookshop, for example, which opened in 1977 and became a sort of literary HQ for punks, was the oldest independent bookshop in Manhattan until it closed in 2016, despite celebrity support from Patti Smith and Salman Rushdie.

I'm confused. Isn't The Strand (just a few blocks away from St Mark's original location) an independent bookstore too? Wikipedia says it was founded in 1927 [1]. That was another bookstore that I visited frequently, though I would argue that it's reached a certain level of critical mass and success that makes it able to buck the general trend -- even if Amazon has a bigger selection and better prices, visiting The Strand is a worthwhile experience in itself. Similar to B&H Photo Video [2]

[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/01/st-marks-bookshop-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strand_Bookstore

[2] https://www.bloomreach.com/en/blog/2016/03/bh-photo-competes...

Yes, Strand Books is indeed an independent book store. In fact that whole stretch of of 4th Ave a block away used to be NYC's "book row." See:

https://untappedcities.com/2015/08/26/4th-avenue-the-history...

I think there’s two elements. One is rent, which is a very real issue: Saint’s Alp and The Cheese Shop never had a quiet moment, were basically on the same block, and have both gone belly up.

That said, the bookstore sucked. It had far too few books per square foot - easily an order of magnitude or more less than the Strand - but their curation was, outside of political tracts, bland and unsurprising. I’d never walk in there and find the book I was looking for; I’d never walk in there and find an unexpected gem. You have to deliver at least one of those, and your curation had better be top notch if your position is “we will only stock a (relative) handful of books.”

They went out of business because they were bad at what they did, but great stores on the same block can’t cope with the rent either.

> I'm guessing the problem - as with most small retail stores in Manhattan - is rising rent.

I think the bigger problem is jerks like me who go to bookstores to browse or use the restroom and then go home and order the books on amazon. Sadly, I just can't be bothered to carry the books home. I just can't.

> Ironically, that is resulting in plenty of retail vacancies.

Is this odd to anyone else? From the Manhattan mall to downtown to the UWS, I'm seeing as many vacancy signs today as I saw during the financial crisis 10 years ago. Strange to see so many vacancies in such a strong economy. Maybe it's that so much of economic commerce is going online. What's going to happen during a recession? Are all storefronts going to be banks and RiteAid/Duane Reade?

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