Customers line up to pay for their discounted books and other merchandise on Friday at Tribeca's Barnes & Noble. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
It’s been a busy, unfamiliar scene at Tribeca’s Barnes & Noble these last few days. Shoppers, clutching their books and other merchandise, standing in long lines waiting to pay. Unfortunately, it’s the store’s recently announced closing, and the deep discounts that go with it, that are now luring shoppers back to the store.
Barnes & Noble announced “with great sadness” on Thursday that its 16-year run at 97 Warren Street would end on Jan. 14, “as the landlord has chosen to redevelop.”
“We’ve loved being a part of this neighborhood and are doing everything we can to find a new location,” the store said in its announcement, posted on Instagram.
“We have so many great memories from events, to meeting authors and making a positive influence in our Tribeca community,” the store also noted.
Customers were quick to mournfully respond.
Jake Green, 22, said he was 6 years old when the store opened. “I grew up learning how to read here. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wandered through the store either to look or to buy. Many an afternoon was spent here after the elementary school day was over.”
“My daughter and I are devastated,” wrote Carmen Rita Wong. “You have been not only our neighborhood bookstore for 13+ years but a wonderful escape and respite for us both.”
The 38,000-square-foot space is being marketed by Newmark is described in its listing as a “unique big box opportunity in the heart of Tribeca, located in the same building as Whole Foods,” and boasting “over 100FT of banner signage on Greenwich Street.” Bed Bath & Beyond, located opposite Barnes & Noble, closed earlier this year.
The bookstore opened to great fanfare in November 2007 and to a bit of wide-eyed wonder for Tribecans unused to “big box stores” in their neighborhood of small-scale retail. “It doesn’t feel like we’re in Tribeca,” said one longtime resident. Those entering the store for the first time, the Trib noted in its story on the opening, “were not just seeing a big chain store filled with endless shelves of books, but a quantum commercial leap for Tribeca, and many familiar faces that seemed strangely out of place.”
It will be the store’s shuttered doors that sadly will now seem out of place. “Well,” Stacey Miller Zarrelli concluded in her Instagram post, “this just stinks.”
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