Sunday, August 30, 2015

A loss of 'community and individual enterprise'


[Photo by Steven from Aug. 18]

Back on Aug. 19, we noted that the Glasgow Vintage Co. closed its retail space at 331 E. Ninth St. after less than a year here between First Avenue and Second Avenue.

Glasgow's closure is a jumping off point for a piece at HuffPost the other day by Nancy Cohen-koan, who laments the loss of more small shops in the neighborhood.

"My neighborhood gets sadder and sadder," she writes. "As the greed machine grows and grows, so goes community and individual enterprise."

As for Glasgow Vintage:

They had always dreamed of having a shop in New York's East Village, after successfully owning a top vintage store in Glasgow. What they didn't bargain for was an avaricious landlord who had scaffolding and a trash bin in front of his shop for most of the year. The company was very busy building upward on the old tenement. That meant that shoppers couldn't easily see the shop to come in and browse. Naturally, the landlord wouldn't give these decent folk a break.

The Kushner companies bought 329-335 E. Ninth Street (and 325 E. 10th St.) in the spring of 2013 for $28.75 million.

Previously on EV Grieve:
East 9th Street buildings will soon be taller thanks to the NYC Board of Standards and Appeals

East Ninth Street parking lot will yield to 6-floor residential building

East 9th Street buildings starting to grow taller

5 comments:

  1. You can bet that any shops in the 16 building Morton Tabak portfolio that was sold to Raphael Toledano will be booted -- wait and see. It becomes even more important to pass the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, if we want to give the shops in the EV some way of surviving and protecting themselves from these avaricious landlords and greedy developers.

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  2. It becomes more clear now why Jill Anderson—the tenant prior to the Glasgow Vintage Co.—packed up and left so suddenly.

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  3. Totally agree. Loved the diversity and sense of adventure of the retail scene in the EV in the pre-shit era.

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  4. It's a tautological argument. Since community is small business owners and their customers, when the small business goes, the community goes too.

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  5. Jill Anderson used to have her workspace in a Tabak building on E. 11th -- those spaces are now a laundry and a psychic.

    Miss her shop. And so many others.

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