Noon on a pleasant spring Sunday, and my neighborhood in Manhattan seemed the destination favored by singles and couples and families for a weekend stroll. More crowded than usual were the streets, my point of observation windows of a corner cafe.
The atmosphere was weekend relaxed, though I wondered what so many people must have thought as they passed all closed: a dry cleaners, a men’s clothing shop, two eateries, a shoe repair shop, a fine soup place, a woman’s shoe store, a barber shop, an exclusive candy store, an independent bookstore—all firmly shuttered, all within an area of only a few blocks.
Since I live near these places, I’ve seen some that got recently closed, but a good number who have been gone for months and even years. Storefronts sit obstinately vacant, have sat vacant, no one willing to pay the obscene rent demanded by their owners. The neighborhood suffers the loss of these small merchants.
Just lately I talked about this with the son of a family that owns a couple of my favorite coffee and pastry shops nearby. “It’s terrible,” he stated, agreeing with my assessment. His interest is more than passing. “Lately our rent was more than doubled,” he said. “We raise the prices of our goods, but they were high already. You can raise them only so much.” Thinking of how many other shops I miss, I said that I hoped they wouldn’t be departing soon.
Neighborhoods evolve and change—you can see it anywhere. But this is an epidemic that is transforming a whole district—and in Manhattan it isn’t the one neighborhood only. Only landmarked buildings prevent even more to be demolished in favor of larger, probably uglier structures all over the island.
There’s no mystery, of course, to what’s behind this. The shoe repairman didn’t leave willingly—he left because the owner of his small place did what the young man in the coffee house related, hiked his rent to an untenable figure. You’d have to repair a staggering number of shoes to make a profit paying that rent. And so he quit, and if you need your shoes renewed, a new place had to be found. In the case of the barber shop, located around the corner from me, it’s closing marked the end of a location of half a century. Both were businesses where they knew your name.
Determined not to let their landlords go blameless, some merchants have closed their doors and left with a sign on the front explaining their departure. I’ve seen a couple such signs yellowing from the years they’ve hung there.
If there is a replacement for one of these small shops, it’s invariably another bank, another chain drugstore, another nail salon, another operation that may look small but that is part of a larger organization that survives by widely spreading its operating costs, another business that while filling no need diminishes the character of a neighborhood.
I read recently that in Paris, where shop owners have faced a similar situation, the city has supported some small businesses by making up the difference between their current and asked for rent. Would that that happen here.
There is the question, of course, as to whether as a mere private citizen, I have the right to complain about the closings of these shops. Here’s my take: Those small merchants provide a sense of solidity and safety to their neighborhoods and dependability to their customers. Those are the places where you get a handshake from the owner or, in the case of the coffee house, from his son. That young man’s shop offers good food, but it’s his smile, cheery and welcoming, that I know awaits me and keeps drawing me back there. His corner place, like others sadly gone, helps make a neighborhood more than a collection of bricks in a very large city.
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Stanley Ely writes about urban life in his new book, “Thinking It Through: Reflections Past Eighty.”