Books & Bookstores
By SARAH MASLIN NIR NOV. 2, 2016 |
Every day after school, 4-year-old Nicholai Rose demands that his mother take him first to the park then to the Barnes & Noble
in the Baychester neighborhood of the Bronx. There, they snuggle in a
corner in the children’s section and, each time, read “I Need My
Monster,” his favorite picture book.
In
a few months their ritual will end — permanently — when the store
closes for good, leaving the Bronx, a borough with nearly 1.5 million
people, without one general-interest bookstore. For residents, the
closing carries a painful sting the borough knows too well, of being
long underserved and overlooked, which persists even as the Bronx is
experiencing a renaissance.
“How
am I going to tell him that the bookstore is going?” said Nicholai’s
mother, Shauna Rose, 29, as she sat in the store on Wednesday, the
monster book on her lap. “And there’s nothing else.”
With 50,000 titles in its inventory, the Barnes & Noble opened in the Bronx in 1999. Two years ago, it nearly closed
after the landlord sought to raise the rent. But it remained open after
a public outcry, and after elected officials stepped in to assist in
the rent negotiations. It has withstood the economic crunch that shut
down smaller bookshops in the borough over the years. While there are a
few bookstores in the Bronx attached to various universities and some
stores that sell religious texts, the Barnes & Noble remains the
last of its kind, until it closes in January, because of a rent
increase. It will replaced by a Saks Off 5th store. Read more...
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