Surging Rents Force Booksellers From Manhattan
Literary City, Bookstore Desert
When
Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson bookstore in Lower
Manhattan, set out to open a second location, she went to a neighborhood
with a sterling literary reputation, the home turf of writers from
Edgar Allan Poe to Nora Ephron: the Upper West Side.
She was stopped by the skyscraper-high rents.
“They were unsustainable,” Ms. McNally said. “Small spaces for $40,000 or more each month. It was so disheartening.”
Rising
rents in Manhattan have forced out many retailers, from pizza joints to
flower shops. But the rapidly escalating cost of doing business there
is also driving out bookstores, threatening the city’s sense of self as
the center of the literary universe, the home of the publishing industry
and a place that lures and nurtures authors and avid readers.
“Sometimes
I feel as if I’m working in a field that’s disappearing right under my
feet,” said the biographer and historian Robert Caro, who is a lifelong
New Yorker.
The
Rizzoli Bookstore was recently told that it would be forced to leave
its grand space on 57th Street because the owners decided that the
building would be demolished.
The
Bank Street Bookstore in Morningside Heights announced in December that
it would not renew its lease when it expires in February 2015, saying
that it had lost money for the last decade. Both stores are scrambling
to find new locations.
Independents
like Coliseum Books, Shakespeare and Company on the Upper West Side,
Endicott Booksellers and Murder Ink have all closed their doors.
In
the past, those smaller stores were pushed out by superstores — a trend
memorably depicted in the 1998 film “You’ve Got Mail” — leaving book
lovers worried that someday, Manhattan would be dominated by chain
bookstores.
But
now the chain stores are shutting down, too. Since 2007, five Barnes
& Noble stores throughout Manhattan have closed, including its
former flagship store on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street, which was
shuttered in January. Five Borders stores in Manhattan were closed in
2011 when the chain went bankrupt, vacating huge spaces on Park Avenue,
near Penn Station and in the Shops at Columbus Circle.
State
data reveals that from 2000 to 2012, the number of bookstores in
Manhattan fell almost 30 percent, to 106 stores from 150. Jobs,
naturally, have suffered as well: Annual employment in bookstores has
decreased 46 percent during that period, according to the state’s
Department of Labor.
The
closings have alarmed preservationists, publishers and authors, who
said the fading away of bookstores amounted to a crisis that called for
intervention from the newly minted mayor of New York City, Bill de
Blasio, who has vowed to offer greater support to small businesses.
Mr.
Caro said in an interview that he is heartbroken by the loss of
bookstores from Manhattan, calling it “a profoundly significant and
depressing indication of where our culture is.”
“How
can Manhattan be a cultural or literary center of the world when the
number of bookstores has become so insignificant?” he asked. “You really
say, has nobody in city government ever considered this and what can be
done about it?”
With
the closing of several Barnes & Noble and Borders stores, it is
difficult to shop for new books in Midtown, the same neighborhood that
houses Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and much
of Penguin Random House.
“There
are some great bookstores, but there aren’t a lot of them,” said
Michael Pietsch, the chief executive of Hachette. “Compared to other
cities, New York is no longer a bookstore city.”
There
are still six Barnes & Nobles remaining in Manhattan, but with the
company closing roughly 20 stores each year nationwide, some people in
the industry have urged publishers to step in. Whispers that publishers
will re-enter the brick-and-mortar business — harking back to the days
when the storied names Doubleday and Scribner graced bookstores on Fifth
Avenue — have intensified in recent months. Some publishing insiders
have speculated that Penguin Random House, by far the largest trade
publisher in the world, will expand into retail to fill the void left by
Barnes & Noble, which has struggled to find its footing, and
compete with Amazon.
“You
just have to walk down Fifth Avenue to see what New York has become —
it’s become an outlet mall for rich people,” said Esther Newberg, a
literary agent, adding that she had just received an email from a Random
House editor noting that the company was able to print books quickly
because it owns its own printing plant. “Why don’t they own their own
bookstore?”
Despite
the difficult conditions, some stores appear to be thriving. Posman
Books, a small independent chain, opened a new outpost in Rockefeller
Center in 2011.
And
just as many writers have fled to Brooklyn or Queens in search of more
affordable housing, some bookstore owners have followed. Greenlight
Bookstore in Fort Greene opened in 2009 to robust business and
year-over-year increases in sales.
In December, Christine Onorati, the co-owner of Word bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, opened a second store in Jersey City.
Ms.
Onorati said she never looked seriously at Manhattan because the rents
were so unaffordable. Even with lower rents in Jersey City, she opened a
cafe within the bookstore that serves pastries and Stumptown coffee as
an additional source of revenue, something she had previously vowed she
would never do.
She
said she was concerned that bookstores in high-rent areas like
Manhattan would shift their merchandise away from more accessibly priced
paperbacks toward more expensive items with wider profit margins.
“My
worry is that to make these rents, people are going to have to make the
bookstore a place where only wealthy people can be,” she said. “The
higher and higher these rents go, do you have to bring in these
expensive leather journals and art books that only rich people can buy?”
David
Rosenthal, the president and publisher of Blue Rider Press, an imprint
of Penguin Random House, predicted that stores like Urban Outfitters and
Anthropologie would become more important in the publishing ecosystem
as stand-alone bookstores decrease.
“The
serendipity of hanging out in a bookstore is just diminishing,” Mr.
Rosenthal said. “We’ll become more dependent on stores that are not
primarily bookstores, but have some degrees of books. It’s better than
nothing.”
After
spending years scouring Manhattan for a second location, Ms. McNally of
McNally Jackson abandoned her search. At the urging of a former
employee, she began looking in Brooklyn and settled on Williamsburg,
where she found a “magnificent,” loftlike space with a 20-foot ceiling.
The store will open this fall.
“I
started walking around Williamsburg and I fell in love with the
neighborhood,” she said. “I have not figured out a way to make it happen
in Manhattan. And I wanted to.”
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