'We Tried Our Best': The Closing of Kings Pharmacy, a Tribeca Institution

Jones Chan, the store's pharmacist and co-owner. "As much as the customers helped us, I tried to help the community," he said. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

UPDATE 6/12/23: This story has been updated to include the store where pharmacist Jones Chan expects to begin working on July 15.

“We tried our best. We did as much as we could,” Kings Pharmacy co-owner and pharmacist Jones Chan said, seated in a small office in the rear of the store where he has been filling prescriptions for the past 10 years. On June 14, the 37-year-old druggist will fill his last. And six days later, the 25-year Tribeca institution at the corner of Reade and Hudson Street will close.

On Monday, Kings Pharmacy posted signs in the store announcing the news.

Chan cited the competition that sealed the store’s fate, including Target, CVS with now two nearby locations, Capsule Pharmacy, and online ordering, plus a major insurer that had been enticing patients away from the store. And then, of course, there was Covid.

“We tried to stay after the effects of Covid, everybody moving out, but the bottom line is we couldn’t support the business with the sales we were having,” Chan said.

The store’s 10-year lease ended at the end of March, and was extended for three more months, Barry Blum, the bookkeeper and Chan’s other working partner among five owners, said in a phone interview.  The owners never got to the point of trying to negotiate a new lease, Blum said, “because we realized the rent we are paying now, just with the changing landscape, we couldn’t afford it.” Blum said the store was doing less than half the business than when it opened.

Chan called Kings Pharmacy customers “the most amazing people in the world,” recalling their response to a GoFundMe campaign during the darkest days of Covid that raised $73,000 towards retaining the store’s employees. “As much as they helped us I tried personally to help the community,” he said. Chan recalled giving as many as 120 Covid shots in a day. “CVS and Duane Reade had appointments only. We said, ‘If you walked in we’ll give you a shot if you want it.’ Our waiting area was full of people.”

Andra Persaud has been a cashier at the store for 17 years. When she learned the store would be closing, “I had to go to the ER for hypertension,” she said. 

“I love the job, I love the neighborhood. The management team has been really good to me. And I love customer service,” she said, recalling how she has watched local kids grow up before her eyes. “The mothers always say to me, ‘Can you remember when she was a little girl in a stroller?”

“I can’t think of a retail business that’s been such an essential part of the neighborhood,” said Bruce Ehrmann, a longtime Tribeca resident and frequent customer. During Covid, Ehrmann recalled, Chan “drove five hours round trip to where we were hunkering down upstate, with a whole Jeep filled with supplies. We waved through the window and he left everything on the porch and drove back to the city. He didn’t even ask for gas money.”

“He is a classic small-town neighborhood pharmacist,” Ehrmann added, “of a type that barely exists in Manhattan anymore.”

“They have been a great part of our success story. They’re our friends,” said Victoria Weil, president of Friends of Bogardus Plaza. The store had been an early donor to the plaza, which is located adjacent to the store, “and they were always available to us. They just had everything you could possibly need,” she said. And as a customer, she added, “They know you. So it feels like a neighborhood pharmacy. I’m really, really sad about it.”  

Chan said he expects to begin working at the CVS pharmacy, 38 Warren St., on July 15.

In the meantime, the pharmacist said, he tells his customers they can “call me, text me, whenever they want. With all the relationships we’ve had, it shouldn’t stop because the pharmacy isn’t here. These are friendships. Life-long friendships.”

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