Dear President Bharucha
Like many admirers of the Cooper Union I have been very disturbed by the thought that you may force the St Mark's Bookshop to close by imposing rents on them which they cannot pay. The St Mark's Bookshop is as much a New York institution as the Cooper Union is. I urge you not to make this irreversible cultural mistake.
Please reduce the bookshop rent to $15,000 a month until the economy improves. To destroy one of the city's last, great independent stores for the sake of what to you would be a paltry increase in income would be ... if I may say this as someone who has been proud to appear in the Great Hall on many occasions, and to bring the PEN World Voices Festival there ... unforgivable.
Many of us care about this deeply. Save the St Mark's Bookshop. Please.
With my best wishes,
Salman Rushdie.
Dear President Bharucha:
My father is an artist and taught at Cooper Union in the early 1960s and I have lived in the East Village since 1986. I've been a patron of St. Mark's Bookshop when it was located on St. Mark's Place and then when it moved to its current location. I walk by Cooper Union several times a day, always proud that my family was part of its legacy.
I am surprised and disappointed that a community has had to launch a campaign to urge you to reduce the rent of St. Mark's Bookstore, and to now learn that you are still about to make a decision. You should not have had to think twice about this. It's the right thing to do.
The bookstore is a vital, vibrant part of this community, a community that has changed dramatically over the past two decades. The neighborhood is in danger of becoming just like all the other neighborhoods in New York, beholden to those with deep pockets but sorely lacking the artistic and creative qualities that have made the East Village the most special of places, and that give it literary and artistic value. Surely Cooper Union--dedicated to the arts, architecture and humanities--can understand this. Surely, as an icon in schools promoting the importance of visual thinking, you can understand the power of symbols?
My father and I were dismayed to learn that you will not reduce the bookshop's rent by $5,000 a month during hard economic times. What does Cooper Union stand for? A school that does not charge tuition to its students--one of the best schools in the country in what used to be the most arts-friendly neighborhoods in the nation? Please stay true to your founding values and reduce the rent of this worthy bookstore.
Heidi Boghosian
Avenue A
New York NY
Dear President of Cooper Union,
As a novelist based in downtown Manhattan for thirty years I'm desperately worried by the idea that St. Mark's may be lost because of the high rent imposed by Cooper Union. Surely everything Cooper Union stands for would seem to insist that this unique bookstore must survive. I'm far from alone in saying that from my earliest years as a writer in New York I've largely educated myself by means of what I've found on St Mark's shelves: the classics and contemporary works I knew I needed, and a host of unusual and unexpected works I didn't know I needed, but which proved invaluable for my literary and intellectual development. St Mark's has been both a library and an informal meeting place for decades of my life as a writer here.
To allow St Mark's to die would be a serious blow to the cultural vitality of lower Manhattan. It is no ordinary bookstore, it is that increasingly rare thing, an independent that is perfectly attuned to the tastes and needs of the community it serves. It would be a careless act to let it go under, and it would be a source of real regret for all concerned in years to come. Its loss would be very badly felt. We would all suffer, and more deeply than would the institutional bottom line. This is a special case. Please, I beg you, allow St Mark's to continue to nourish one of the last truly creative communities in Manhattan.
St Mark's Bookstore is a special case.
yours
Patrick McGrath
Dear Mr. President,
In the 1930s, Cooper educated my immigrant great-uncle for free. He went on to create an award-winning invention that revolutionized allied military communications in World War II.
He was the first member of my family to go to college. Now a university professor myself, I am writing to ask Cooper to invest -- once again -- in something of unquestionable value to our world and for our future.
I understand that the cost of operating a university, particularly one of Cooper's famed generosity and caliber, in downtown New York is overwhelming.
However, in the case of St. Mark's -- which helps set and preserve the cultural tone of the Cooper area -- issues of value and cost need to be evaluated from higher perspectives.
The East Village doesn't need another sushi bar or boutique. It doesn't need to follow the fate of Soho and become a suburban mall.
It needs to maintain the high intellectual, cultural, and artistic standards for which it has so long been known -- the standards that draw top students, as they did my great-uncle, to Cooper and NYC: students who will later bring honor back upon Cooper through their contributions.
The loss of St. Mark's -- easily the finest curator and purveyor of intellectual, cultural, and art-and-design volumes in the US, matched only by a few counterparts in Germany and France -- would mean more than few thousand dollars in additional rent it would bring.
Please show the world that Cooper is dedicated to much more than easy profit by making an exception in this one important case and allowing St. Mark's to continue to operate.
Thank you!
Sincerely,
Professor S.I. Salamensky
Theater and Performance Studies
UCLA
“They claim they’re broke and they can’t afford it financially,” said Contant, noting that the school offered the shop a chance to postpone paying a month’s rent to another time over the course of the next seven years left on the lease.
Owners Bob Contant and Terry McCoy found out their bid for a $5,000 rent cut was nixed by landlord Cooper Union in a meeting with T.C. Westcott, a vice president for finance and administration at the arts and engineering school.
"They don't feel they can do anything in terms of the rent," McCoy said. "She started out by telling us that Cooper is really losing a lot of money."
Their proposal (in partnership with the Ali Forney Center) is "to turn a vacant city owned building at 222 E. 13th St. into housing for 12 - 18 homeless LGBT youth. Community Board 3's resolution will urge HPD (the City's housing agency) to grant us site control so that we can apply for the funds needed to renovate the building. We appreciate the support of the more than 500 people who signed the petition in support of our proposal. We will continue to need community support to move this project forward to a successful conclusion. There are over 1,500 homeless LGBT youth in NYC, so this is a small, but important, step in addressing the larger crisis."
The victim responded to an ad on Craigslist and arranged with Emma Hunt, 25, to lease the pad on East Sixth Street, between First and Second Avenues, for $3,250, court papers claim.
The victim forked over the money and was given a set of keys that didn’t work, cops said.
Hunt was arrested Oct. 19 and charged with grand larceny.
For some twenty years Mars Bar, on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue, Manhattan, has been my bar. That's where we went for beer and tequila whenever we had to take a break from our work at Anthology Film Archives, and it was also a bar where most of those who came to see movies at Anthology ended up after the shows. We always had a great time at Mars Bar. It was always open, there was always the juke box, and very often there was no electricity, and it was old and messy and it didn't want to be any other way — it was the last escape place left in downtown New York. So this is my love letter to it, to my Mars Bar. Mars Bar as I knew it.
Please contact Cooper Union President Jamshed Bharucha immediately. President@cooper.edu or (212) 353-4250.
A Board committee is meeting [today] to decide if they will reduce St Mark's Bookshop's $20,000/month rent by $5,000. Thousands of emails or calls will influence the decision.
Tell the President to reduce the bookshop rent to $15,000 a month until the economy improves. You can add any additional comments.
Your support is invaluable.
