Forty-three years ago, John Bommer Murphy II had a middle-aged lover named Joe McEarthy. Joe had been some kind of senior business executive, like the Bommer’s father who was then head of Associated Dry Goods, so they communicated well.
Joe lived way the hell up on the Upper West Side, around West 108th Street, I think, near the tennis courts in Riverside Park. When the Bommer and I moved into 235 Second Avenue (not quite East Village; certainly not Gramercy Park) Joe would praise the area for its useful retailers. Hardware stores were high on his list. You don’t need more ice cream shops or fern-bar cafes, he’d say; you need hardware stores and cheap groceries. This is why Joe liked his skankier outreaches of the UWS, or so he maintained.
I kept this in mind a few years later when chain ice-cream shops (Steve’s Ice Cream) and t-shirt shops (The Gap) were moving into the East Village. Around 1984 one of the finest Ukrainian restaurants on Second Avenue, The Orchidia, had to move out to be replaced by a Steve’s Ice Cream, a local chain. We had some mild protests on the the sidewalk at the time.
Foreigners (there were plenty of foreigners, mostly from Austria) couldn’t understand. “Why you no like Steve? Steve wants store, why you no let Steve sell ice cream?” I heard from the Foreigner beside me. These people were clueless.
In karmic justice, the skeezy Steve’s Ice Cream only lasted a year or two. I have no idea what’s down there now.
Anyway, forty years later, I see that the mega-retailers whom I’d come to depend on, some of which were themselves responsible for gobbling up the ma-and-pa hardware stores and coffee shops in recent decades, have also bit the dust. Bed Bath & Beyond: where else would you go for sheets or a duvet cover? They no longer exist. Best Buy: they barely exist. These two examples were my regular go-tos on the near Upper West Side, near Lincoln Center. BestBuy has a surviving branch, way down on Fifth Avenue near 42nd Street. BB&B is gone for good. Am I now supposed to buy all my earphones and sheets and comforters via Amazon? I actually did buy a cheap polyester comforter from Amazon recently.
Worse nightmare yet: is HomeDepot on the way out? I bet it is. But for the meantime, since most of the local hardware stores are dead and gone, we are left with these big-box places that will necessarily fail because wide inventory and expansive retail space are no substitute for specialization and goodwill. My closest HomeDepot one is over on Third Avenue, near 59th. That’s quite a hike, but I don’t mind. I will be upset on learning that it’s not long for this world.
The decay of specialty retail stores is something I first spotted about 35 years ago. Up the street from me, across from Carnegie Hall, we had a little shop called Uncle Sam’s Umbrellas. The proprietor of Uncle Sam’s could tell you anything about the history and manufacture of umbrellas. Uncle Sam’s is of course no more. Like the chain cosmetic boutique on the corner of 57th and 7th, formerly an outlet for remaindered books for Barnes & Noble, but now just another dreary ATM branch for Chase Bank.
Stationers suffered most, I think. Stationers and their ennobled kinsfolk, art-supply shops. They got gobbled up by chains calling themselves Office Club or Office Depot. Not far from that dear departed Uncle Sam’s Umbrellas lies the dead Lee’s Art Shop, a cynosure for art directors and illustrators for many decades. It leaves behind a tiny shop in the Art Students League across the street, but the supply of everything there is necessarily limited. Then, over on Broadway, between 57th and 56th, you have a Staples, as generic an office-supply shop as you can find. Do they sell fountain pens? Not a chance. Cartridges for your fountain pens? Good luck. Sepia ink or sepia-ink cartridges? Hahaha.
We used to have a dozen shops around, within walking distance, that could sell you every type of ink under the rainbow. Good luck finding something like that now, short of Amazon or maybe online Dick Blick.
