The Charm of a City Bookstore
Some people navigate the city by following street signs, the city a grid logically laid out before them. Others follow the landmarks scattered across the city, the ones tourists from far and wide come to see. Trinity Church by Wall Street, the Empire State Building on W 34 Street, Central Park running from W 59 Street to Central Park North. Not me. I navigate my city with the bookstores I love.
If I was asked to name the first bookstore I ever visited, it would be Westsider Books, on Broadway and W 80 Street in the Upper West Side. As a baby, my parents carried me around on their weekend trips into Manhattan, and one of my earliest memories is sitting outside Westsider Books in my stroller, staring up at the stacks of books in carts outside the shop. Whenever we’d visit the Upper West Side, I’d insist upon revisiting the bookstore before snacking on the free samples across the street at Zabar’s. My parents would park my stroller in front of the sleek metal carts in front of the store that held the bargain books and would find a children’s book for me to thumb through while they scoured the stacks for a novel. Back then the larger books were too challenging for my small mind, unable to comprehend the stories held within. At the time I was satisfied with my picture books. At the time, the colorful illustrations were much more interesting to me than the old English inside the volumes lining the shelves of the rare bookstore. But even then, I loved the smell of the old paper inside the leatherbound volumes and the floor to ceiling bookshelves seemed to reach into the sky and go on forever. This quaint shop wasn’t like the loud and bustling Barnes and Noble down the street, another bookshop I frequented but never found quite as charming. I loved the subdued colors of the well-worn bindings, each book a soldier standing at attention, stacked precisely in its spot. As I got older, I traded in the picture books for mystery novels and would snatch up any Penguin Classics editions I could find along the shelves. The store fed my curiosity of the world, of love and magic, and everything else I could find between the pages of a book. Westsider Books felt like my family’s little haven along Broadway.
Westsider almost closed my sophomore year of college, in 2019. I had spent a relaxing Saturday morning in my bed, lazily scrolling through local news on my phone when I saw the announcement. The store could no longer afford to stay open because of the cost of paying the rent and was forced to close. The news hit me like a punch in the gut. I was devastated. It felt like a chapter of my history was being ripped out. Later that day I made the trek from my dorm on E 25 and 1st Avenue to the store and bought three books, cherishing my time wandering through the aisles. I explored the upstairs section, an area I never got to visit as a child because the staircase seemed insurmountable at the time, a mountain with steep slopes that my four-year-old self wasn’t ready to conquer. The metal carts outside the store holding books you could get for a dollar were rusted, not the sleek carts I remembered from my childhood. Above the window’s book display were signs describing the unfortunate circumstances, announcing the end of the store after 35 years in business. Leaving the store that day felt like I was saying goodbye to a family member, someone who had watched me grow up and nurtured me over the years.
What I didn’t know at the time was that Westsider Books had been a source of joy for many New Yorkers, a calming respite from the rat race of the city, and I wasn’t the only one hurting at the thought of it closing. People flocked to the store after the announcement of its closing. Within five days a GoFundMe campaign raised $52,000 to keep the store open. The New Yorker even did a piece on the people who frequented the store.
I realized that the store I once thought was my own little slice of paradise had been a second home for quite a lot of people, and for that I was grateful. With the money raised, Westsider Books was able to keep its doors open for another year, followed by another. It’s still open today, and I look forward to the day I’m back in the city, wandering the aisles once again.