Chain Store Nostalgia? Who'da Thunk It?

Walking in New York City’s West Village a month ago, I encountered something I should have expected but nevertheless was none too happy to find: The Barnes & Noble store on the corner of 8th St. and 6^th Avenue was closed and shuttered. A sign in the window said “Thank you for your 12 years of patronage.” Cue up the Freddie Mercury: Another one bites the dust. It was the last bookstore on a block that used to have a plethora of them, an area that was one of my favorite destinations.

A.T. Stewart's in New York City, the first department store.

Another favorite destination for me has been the strip of J&R retail outlets in Lower Manhattan. Though not a national chain like B&N, it’s been a wonderland of computers, audio gear, cameras, CDs and DVDs, even small home appliances—all bunched in discrete multi-floor stores that ran an entire block on Park Row. You could spend hours browsing there. J&R is not gone, but it’s now being consolidated into one building, the total on-site inventory obviously much reduced. It included the last truly comprehensive CD store I know of in Manhattan or Brooklyn, where you could get almost any jazz or classical music title, karaoke disc, rock ‘n’ roll release old or new, world music, experimental work, etc. There were two vast floors of the stuff. Some B&Ns, as well as Target and Best Buy, still have record sections, but they’re shrunken husks of what they used to be.

It almost pains me to say it—after all, I made a Super 8 movie in high school sermonizing against the excesses of consumer culture—but I miss the big-ass, impersonal chain stores like Virgin Records, Circuit City, Tower Records and Tower Video, even Blockbuster. Not to mention humongous indie stores like Coliseum Books and the cavernous video stores that used to dot my neighborhood in Brooklyn.

I miss popping on earphones and listening to the latest releases at the listening stations at those big record stores, which also had computer kiosks where you could swipe a bar code or type in the name of a song or artist or band and find out what product they had out and if the store carried it. I feel sad there’s no place where punk rock vixens and surly, far-more-hipper-than-thou music geeks could find employment. (Actually, they weren’t all surly, they just looked like it, probably a job requirement.) I miss spending an hour on a Saturday afternoon at a big video store eyeballing rows and rows of possibilities to pick out that evening’s entertainment.

And I miss select Barnes & Noble outlets sprinkled across Midtown to Lower Manhattan that are no longer. These are places to which I used to whisk my stroller-age daughter. I’d head to the café sections, park her while she napped, grab a cappuccino and dive into a pile of magazines or new hardcover books I couldn’t afford to buy. Later on, my daughter in school,  I’d head out with my laptop to these same bookstore cafes and work on various writing projects or surf the net. Ditto various Borders bookstores. These places probably paid their staff shit wages; the coffee was standard-issue; the same wallpaper portraits of famous authors emblazoned the walls of all those B&Ns—nice at first but eventually tiresome–but there were also pitchers of ice water, with lemon slices, for which you weren’t charged, and reasonably priced finger food like muffins and bagels. It wasn’t easy spreading refrigerator-hard cream cheese on those toasted bagels with a flimsy plastic knife, but I did it and I liked it.

I’m aware of the irony that these big-ass book stores were once considered bogeymen who drove out the little guys. That the CDs sold in the big record palaces were severely overpriced and you were nuts to pay full price for anything after Amazon came around. That Tower Video discriminated against poor people or anyone who didn’t have a credit card, including me for a long time.

Interior of A.T. Stewart's.

To this day, I make a point of buying books at indie places if I know ahead of time what I want. And there are still indie book emporiums you can patronize, like Strand in New York and Powell’s in Portland, Ore., if you’re lucky enough to live near one.

Still, often enough I find myself hunkered down in the café of one of the B&Ns that are still around, riffling through zines or working on the laptop. And I still prefer buying audio equipment and computers in a big store like J&R—which recently added a café–than online.

The coffee options in these places, even if predictable, are still better than what I have at home.