The Strand Book Store in New York City is a rare landmark beloved by both tourists, for its clever literary souvenirs, and locals, for its frequent author events. Its owner wants to maintain the store’s place as an iconic locale, but to do so, it can’t be a landmark at all, at least officially.
Against owner Nancy Bass Wyden’s wishes, the Landmarks Preservation Commission gave landmark status to the home of the Strand, an 11-story building near Union Square, earlier this year. With characteristic cluelessness, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted after the announcement, “This week we made it a landmark so that the culture and community it brings to the Village can be enjoyed by New Yorkers for generations to come.”
But rather than seeing the designation as an honor, Bass Wyden sees it as a potentially devastating headache.
“It’s going to add a lot of extra red tape and bureaucracy and added cost which we don’t need to be put on us and the government should be doing the opposite,” Bass Wyden, who owns both the building and the business, told the Guardian, calling it an instance of “government overreach.”
Bass Wyden plans to sue to prevent the designation, which would allow the government to regulate even changes to the store’s exterior signs, she says. One of the world’s largest independent bookstores, the 92-year-old Strand serves 5,000 visitors a day. Stifling the store’s freedom could affect those visitors, Bass Wyden argues, and the government might better direct its efforts elsewhere.
“They should be encouraging grassroots small businesses, people that have mass amount of employees, they should be helping them instead of hindering them with further governmental bureaucracy and restrictions,” she said. “I call it a bureaucratic noose that’s been put on my throat now.”
The dust-up evokes a fictional one from Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. In one scene, an African American bishop asks the mayor of New York City not to give his church landmark status, so that its dwindling congregation can more easily sell off the property. Right there, the mayor picks up his phone and tells the Landmarks Commissioner to “lay off ” and leave St. Timothy’s alone. He hangs up and then asks the bishop to participate in his anti-crime blue-ribbon panel. When the bishop declines, the mayor tells him not to worry about the landmark business: “I did it because I think it’s in the best interests of the city. It’s as simple as that.”
But the moment the bishop leaves his office, the mayor calls up the Landmarks Commissioner again.
“Mort? You know that church, St. Timothy’s? … Right … Landmark the son of a bitch!”
As Tom Wolfe predicted, politicians aren’t always so helpful to their constituents. Landmark status, though ostensibly well-intentioned, can become a frustrating form of political gamesmanship. You can get the book, by the way, through the Strand’s online store.
