Last day on Friday, April 11; and so, someone has already erected scaffolding in anticipation of the end…….
“There are places I remember all my life though some have changed, some forever, not for better, some have gone and some remain, all these places have their moments”….. John Lennon and Paul McCartney circa 1965
There are places I have gone to at very specific times, of the year and otherwise, that initiate certain strong sentiment. Among these are places, when the next year comes around, I feel the indelible sense that I should be there again, and hope to be so for each and every year, forever….. because they are among the great sources, for me, of inspiration, now and hopefully into the future. I know that sounds corny. I suppose this is some version of déja vu, but I don’t exactly know. This year, I have felt this way about London, at the end of January, and again about Paris just this past week. And, of course, I am wistfully anticipating my return to Rome, Positano and Taormina in early May – and while, in actuality, I am not going there, my body feels as though it should be. Yesterday, I had one of these strong senses of sentiment, right here in NYC.
As we trend into a paperless society, in one genré, then another, one thing I fear is the loss of books, all of the beautiful treasures and especially, old books. I have always been a forager at old book stores, loving to find, not only a great deal on a special out of print item – where someone has scratched in pencil, $2.”, but because they have a forever-mysterious provenance, like an antique or an old portrait. For me, losing books will be the great loss of many wonderful permanent experiences, the holding, page-through, touch, feel, the paper, the texture, the cut of the page, the binding, the illustration and all the thoughts of all the vision and otherwise, that the creator put into its development. I am a book hoarder, now and forever, because, just as you want to hoard your most precious memories of everyone and everything you hold dear, books are among these memories…….
Today, I’m feeling a great urge to say “Shame on you NYC!”, even as I saw a lot of reporting around the pending Rizzoli closing, including, “Considering the buildings were first recommended for landmarking in 2007, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who led the proceedings, said it’s “quite shocking” that there’s been no hearing by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Without action to protect landmarks and small business, she warned, “we will live in a uniform and sterile environment, an environment with no character, with no outlets for smaller retail stores and places of arts, letters, and culture.” – courtesy, the Gothamist”.
“We are looking for a place to go, but we haven’t found one yet.” Confounding words. Yesterday, I went to the Rizzoli bookstore at 31 W 57th St. in Manhattan. I felt a sadness and a wrongness about the impending demise of this place. I had read, many weeks back, about how they were being forced to move because they were knocking the building down. My immediate reaction? NO! Who would do this? But, as with all of life, change seems to have its own momentum going and occurs in spite of reason, and justness. Well, my reason and justness, and apparently many others, anyway. I feel this way about the changes to the NY Public Library that have been in the news lately too, but I digress.
This feeling, otherwise possibly characterized as “sentiment” applies to other similar venues in my past – to other losses I have felt in terms of place – venues that, for various reasons spoke to me and became, irreplaceable in my childhood – mostly the French Pastry Shop in Morristown, NJ and the old Short Hills Mall stores of Brentano’s Tepper’s, Bonwit Teller, Peck and Peck, Abercrombie and Fitch(not the current version) , the old open-air mall, which I much preferred, and ultimately B. Altman and Co, and especially their Charleston Garden bakery – home of my most favorite Honey Loaf – gone but never to be forgotten. Most of you will not recall any of these, I’m sure. You may think that a shopping mall is a funny place to be sentimental about, but it was one of the first places I saw categorically destroyed, for no seemingly-useful purpose, to me, in my youth. It just fell into that horrible category, “this is now, that was then – and this no longer applies”. This was, along with a significant list of irreplaceable, architecturally significant, and beautiful historical mansions along Madison Avenue in Morristown, a great part of the town’s history and character – a catastrophic event!
While someone’s financial justification of these events is obvious, I find these “changes” to be inexplicable on another level, more fundamental level. While those losses in my youth had nothing to do with the digital age, having occurred well before its onset, I remember finding them to be a bazaar chain of events – even way back then, as in “why would they ever do this?”
What is it about certain places that become indelible in one’s memories? There is no doubt that the digital age and the implosion of the internet as the primary mode of “travel” in the spheres of shopping, reading, research, watching, recalling, and yes, socializing – well, just about everything, has changed our lives forever. Yet, I wonder whether we realize how totally it has and will continue to change our physical landscape – forever. And I worry it will continue the bland homogenization of our special places into toxic and horribly- pedestrian visions of “anywhere USA”. (I could go on a tirade about the strip-mall/big box phenomenon but I won’t).
I suppose in concert with earth day and all the discussion of climate change, I have been thinking lately about the concept of “sub-division” – how you could look at our planet as one big sub-division – How, in time-lapse photography, you could watch the world change into smaller and smaller pieces and “used” for purposes suitable to the times, by people who imagine space to be something it wasn’t before and take all the steps necessary to make it into something “new” and different. I was thinking about this the other day when I was thinking about the former owners of our property here in NJ, and how the land they once owned was one big, beautiful parcel – and is now a hodgepodge of homesites and fields. But, again, I digress.
What is the point of this post? It is that certain “things” occur in one’s life which seem to be destined to change, but seem to be more appropriately kept intact, as in forever. Would anyone ever think of tearing down the remnants of the Collosseum or the Eiffel Tower? I’m not comparing Rizzoli Bookstore to the Collosseum and yet, there seems to be this mindless yet, definite, chipping-away of iconic properties everywhere. While I seem to be rambling here, it is true that the fate of Rizzoli, a small but special spot which is part of an aura I love, is part of an often mindless and pointless trend of destruction of what I feel is a valuable fabric of my lifetime. Oh well, you say – you’ll get over it, you will forget, too….. But, no.
Part of what I love about New York City is that it does have a sense of permanence to it – there are certain things about it which will probably never change, at least willingly. Rizzoli? Probably this icon, standing here only since 1985, but feeling otherwise, could have easily been picked for demise a lå Shop Around the Corner from You’ve Got Mail. In fact, bookstores everywhere are sticking out there just waiting to be particalized and gone forever. In fact, the movie,” You’ve Got Mail” just hung about me, sillily, as I struggled to capture the sentiment of the whole experience I saw there yesterday.
Stepping into the store was accompanied with a sense of urgency, and not just mine – like oh, I have to soak this up as thoroughly and indelibly as I can before it’s gone next Friday. The employees there seem to have accepted this outcome, I had not. West 57? A beautiful townhouse? An uncommon selection of books, an oasis to visit bearing a sense of peacefulness and a unique culture and charm, very reminiscent of past times, right there smack in the center of mid-town….. um, well, to lose it seems just plain wrong. Yet, upon doing some digging, I found out that yes, some ambitious land-developer-cum-visionary has his own idea of what “should” go there and yield some big financial bounty, completely sans-conscience, and that, to me is well, a step toward the blaspheme. I fear, that by a month from now, most people will just walk by and not even recall what was once there, sadly.
As I walked through the door and into the front room I was torn between the urge to page through all the beautiful books on Italy on the front table. Then, I hastily sought out the cookbook, garden, architecture, art and, well, I could have stayed there all day and, given the chance, would have hoarded the entire space into my collective sensibility and kept it there. What’s next, I said to myself, looking around me, pensively?
Urgency – there was a definite sense of it here. People were walking through, sighing deeply and inquiring about the impending sense of doom. How lovely is the interior – one priceless element of what you want to go to New York City for – not some newfangled glass-o-dome luxury condo for someone from the other side of the planet to own and visit for one week a year. (Ok, I’m getting emotional.)
And so, even as I myself found a pile of items to take away at great bargains, I felt sad that I was doing so. Sad, that I could not return again after next Friday. Afraid that they will not, as so many don’t, find a new place to re-open and keep their very own sensibility alive. Sad that there just isn’t enough incentive to fight on. Sad that this, and so many others of these last and wonderful bookstores are going away. I was reminded of last year when I was in London, so enjoying a few hours roaming around at Waterstone’s – again, a place of great aura, warmth and coziness, with beautiful volumes to page through and savor – they would never do this there, would they?. More reminiscence filled me – of the old stacks at the Morristown Library circa 1960s where I spent many a Saturday writing papers for school at the old library tables…….
Anyway, as we walked out the door and I snapped the last of the pictures below, I watched as people strode by mindlessly, completely absorbed in their own workaday hustle-bustle, completely oblivious as to what was about to happen, and I said to myself, well, I truly hope something will happen here before next Friday. But, shamefully, I felt in my heart that it would not. “I turned my collar to the cold and damp” and looked down at the sidewalk – and, just as I remembered how seldom I, myself, pick up a pencil anymore to write, I thought – just as all those iconic images and places mentioned above now only exist in the halls of my memory, these images may someday, ironically, may only exist on the pages of some historical digital communication about old New York as in what would have been one of the books on City history held herein, and people will say, “Remember Rizzoli books? It used to be here in a beautiful townhouse. It was a very special place, but they tore it down……..
Holding out hope:
