It’s a tough time for booklovers in Queens.
The Bayside Barnes & Noble, at 23-80 Bell Blvd., might close down soon, as the bookstore chain said it was not able to reach an agreement with the landlord over its lease.
The news comes on the heels of an announcement that the Forest Hills location, which opened in 1995, will close in January next year and will be replaced in July by Target.
30 comments:
CM Development is going to make the shopping center boring. Maybe they can cut a deal like Ben's.
Another step in the Dumbing down borough that is Queens! But take heart We ARE DIVERSE!
This is all about Barnes and Noble losing money on an antique operation. They knew that books are passé. They even put together their own electronic book system, "Nook", which allowed the cannibalisation of their ink on paper stock. Now they look to be subsidized with low rent.
They caused their own collapse by overextending their operation by opening up stores all around the place. Now they will retreat to keeping their large cash generating operations in Manhattan. The chapter is finished. The book has been closed.
Cord Meyer, their landlord, is an old greedy family run operation that gives no quarter to its tenants. You either come up with the tent, or you vacate the premises.
The shopping center IS already boring.
The problem with Queensites is that they don't look beyond their insular borough.
Manhattan is New York's big oyster, where pearls are to be found.
The cultural tripe of Queens cannot compete with the "Golden Isle" for , food or entertainment, either.
Grow up. Expand your horizons. Take a subway ride. Leave your parochial lives behind.
Northeast Queens is a backwater. The best it has to offer is a quieter suburban mode of life, still within NYC.
Complain to Toby Ann Stavisky...LOL! See what she can do.
Hurry up, though. It looks like this might be her last term in office.
Who will be the next Jewish champion after her political retirement fir Bayside?
I love bookstores but B&N should have seen the writing on the wall and perhaps expanded their offerings with English classes, lectures with evening babysitting, etc.
I miss bookstores but I love the immediacy of Kindle and the price of the library - esp. now that they transfer music and DVDs to other branches.
Is there a Chipotle restaurant in the Bay Terrace Center?
Except for a few branches, the QBPL is paltry and disgusting. Smelly incontinent seniors, rude foreigners playing cards, screaming kids, and rowdy students, with the librarians too jaded or cowed to do anything about it. The city needs more specialized community centers for these people so that they we can stop turning the library into a dumping ground.
The best it has to offer is a quieter suburban mode of life, still within NYC.
That's pretty goddamn valuable, and not everyone wants to threaten it with trendy tourist traps.
Those who look for the old "Main Street" type stores....the butcher...the baker....the candlestick maker...are dreamers captured by their own dreams. These are bygone concepts.
What appeals, and sells most, are digital electronics. If we have codified our lives to become expressions relying upon on and off micro switches....then we'd best learn to read that code. The code says..."Books are expendable". Electro books weigh less too.
Remember "Ye Olde College Book Store"?
Hell....now you could load all of your courses onto a thin tablet and save the risk of becoming a hunchback from carrying around twenty pounds of books each day. "Sanctuary...sanctuary. My shoulders are hurting."
They will close on Dec 31- Home goods will make the parking lot more miserable than it already is
Coming soon to Bay Terrace.......... H Mart or Korean BBQ. Watch and see.
I'm not sorry that I'll get a Target I can easily walk to. That will be pretty sweet. I can count the number of books I've bought at B&N on one hand.
Nobody reads books anymore anyways anyhow
Couldn't agree more with what will come to the B & N space. The Chinafication of FluShing, already having expanded with "Them" buying up homes, "Their" developers and knock down specialists purging original home stock just like dominos, falling one at a time to gargantuize once single family dwellings into zone contested multi-family illegal platforms for jamming more and more crap residents. Is it any wonder that Fortune, Han Yang, or other Aisan dominated chain will sink it's teeth onto this ripe pasture for domination. They see it as a war for conquest. Mark my words...
Well, this sucks. I think that it's a huge disadvantage for the area to lose that Barnes & Noble... Boo to you, Cord Meyer!
"Northeast Queens is a backwater. The best it has to offer is a quieter suburban mode of life, still within NYC."
...That's sort of the point of Northeast Queens. I grew up in Whitestone and College Point, with family in Auburndale and Flushing. We totally benefited from that shopping center being what it is now (I remember when VS was a movie theater... I'm that old). There were different shopping options, and less options around that area back in the day. There was no Target, Roosevelt Field mall was still "small" (and "far" away), and Douglaston was the closest shopping center like that, really. We've all grown accustomed to going to Bay Terrace as locals, more so for practicality since they gave us Duane Reade back in the day. I live in Rego Park and still shop at both stores quite often, so I'm quite discontent that they're both closing. Whenever I'm in Bayside having dinner with my mom or my boyfriend's parents, I stop in for a coffee and still shop at B&N. I haven't strayed from paper books just yet, and sometimes I even order books through them instead of succumbing to Amazon.
"...books are passé"
a) There are plenty of people still buying paperback books, visual coffee table books, children's books, dictionaries, tween (cringe) books and picture books. People still enjoy filling up their bookcases alongside having visual books. b) You do realize that there are people that bring their kids there weekly for readings, and that there are other functions to the store, right? Aside from the books, I often shop the toys, planners, cards, specialty gifts and especially the seasonal mugs there.
I don't see how even the Manhattan locations can remain open.
"Print is dead."
-- Egon Spengler
"Ghostbusters", 1984
Any brick and mortar store where
(1) the consumer knows the product already
(2) it's feasible to ship the product to the consumer
(3) the consumer can wait two days
is at risk
And that covers at lot more than Barnes and Noble.
If you limit "book" to the paper kind, that's at risk as well by e-book substitution..
All books are becoming digital
Who ever thought we'd be missing Barnes & Noble?
We need more Nail salons and "Happy ending" massage parlors.
Bay Terrace is going to $hit!
Chumps in Queens do no book reading anyhow
Barnes & Nobles states they're looking for locations... Willets West mega-mall? Atlas Park --- Border's old location? Some strip mall off the Cross-Island Pkwy? CVS already beat them to Queens Blvd.
I heard its gonna be a Hooters with a sports theme and lots of screens, same owners from Long island.
"Coming soon to Bay Terrace.......... H Mart or Korean BBQ. Watch and see."
Awesome! Getting tired of Boston Market and Panera Bread.
Don't cry for the demise of B&N too fast. They run massive college bookstores like the ones at SUNY Buffalo. In Bay Terrace, their lease ran out, and B&N obviously had taken a look at their bottom line, and decided that Qieens operations just weren't profitable enough. I'm sure the rents had a piece in that decision. B&N continues to have an on line business as well. Maybe this will make some room for locally run small book stores on almost affordable side street locations, but I'm probably just dreaming. Commercial rents aren't affordable for small local businesses. I guess I'll have to take my book browsing to the library.
It's the Buhkarians that have the say in Forest Hills now, not the Koreans.
I just returned from Barnes and Noble's Union Square north store in Manhattan.
What a store! I bought a coffee table art book...a Criterion collection video disc....had a coffee....enjoyed one of their special events that are scheduled regularly. Then I observed two tourists buying books. Their haul amounted to about a dozen artsy type books each customer...to be shipped back home, I guess.
That location gets the traffic and money. The Bay Terrace location gets cheap browsers not buyers. I rest my case.
LOL! They need a couple of good 99 cents stores there instead.
When I said that Queens is a backwater....culturally speaking it certainly is!
I do not put down a quieter suburban mode of living....that's why I live here myself.
I do put down the lazy insular slobs who are proud of not having taken a subway to Manhattan for ten years.
Yes! That is exactly what my neighbor said to me last week.
Archie Bunker lives next door. Cultured yogurt is the kind of culture you can expect to get in Queens.
Get off your asses! Enjoy your quiet refuge of a neighborhood, but the big apple is out there.
Tourists spend thousands to come here and all some dopes can do is complain about a damn local yokel book store closing.
Bay Terrace is an insular borgieous ghetto. Thank heaven that the real NYC is only 23 minutes by railroad.
Gotta shake you Rubes off my back. Go back to plowing your alfalfa fields, ya dumb farmers!
Some literary history:
Remember Brentano's Book Emporium?
Closed a long time ago.
Dalton's?
Closed!
Borders?
Closed!
Other Barnes and Noble locations?
Closed?
Visit Stand book store. They are a New York institution.
"Vey iz mere. Such a journey to da city"!
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