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I didn't say right, but hey, that was catchy. Want seafood just how you download the Instacart app today and get zero delivery fee on your first three orders of service, exclusions, and term supply? There are some movies that I'll always watch. No matter how many times I've seen them before, no matter how I come across them when they're already halfway over.
To be honest, most of these movies are romantic comedies, and one of them is You've Got Now. Don't you love New York and fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. Go.
I'm always ready. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. On the other hand, this is not knowing as it's charms. You've got know as directed by Nora Ephron and is lovingly set on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
It starts Tom Hanks, who just heard as Joe Fox and Meg Ryan as Kathleen Kelly. Professionally, Joe and Kathleen are enemies. He's the brash owner of a powerful expanding chain store called Fox Books, who's putting Kathleen's small, beloved children's bookstore, the shop around the corner out of business. There's only one place to find a children's book in the neighborhood.
I will not always be the case. And it was yours. And it is a charming little bookstore. You probably sell $350,000 with the books in a year?
Did you know that? I'm in the book business. I am in the book business. Personally though, they're falling in love by anonymously exchanging heartfelt emails on AOL.
Do you think we should meet? Meet. Oh my God. You Got Mail is based on a movie also called The Shop Around the Corner that came out in 1940.
That movie is itself based on a Hungarian play written in 1937. But You Got Mail, which came out in 1998, is decidedly a creation of the late 1990s. The movie is set at a very specific moment in time. When the internet was just starting to be widely available, it was not yet entirely clear the extent to which it would transform every aspect of modern life.
It's a moment when most people were still connecting to the internet via dial-up in America online. When people checked their email, if they had one, like maybe once a day on their desktop at home. When very few people had cell phones. When Starbucks was still new to New York City and honoring a tall non-fat cap seemed cool.
But Brooklyn, the borough, did not. And most of all, it's a moment when a vast welcoming brick and mortar bookstore was widely seen as an enemy of booksellers, readers, and vibrant community life. Hey, you know what? We should announce ourselves to the neighbors.
Let them know. Here we come. Oh, this is up to West Side, man. We might as well tell them we'll open in a crack house.
They're going to hate us. As soon as they're here, they're going to be lining up to pick up that big bad change store. They get that big bad change store. Everything they hold dear.
You know what? We're going to seduce them. We're going to seduce them with our square footage and our discounts and our deep arm chairs and our cappuccine. That's right.
They're going to hate us at the beginning. But we'll get them in the air. You know why? Why?
Because we're going to sell them cheap books and legal-addictive stimulants. In the meantime, we'll just put up a big sign coming to a Fox book superstore at the end of the conversation. As you know it, to me, this is the most 1990s thing about you've got now. The force of evil in it, the big bad, the villain, the cost-slashing heartless commercial enterprise that's raising local businesses, destroying community relations and dumbing down creative culture is a thinly veiled Barnes & Noble.
This is decodering a show about cracking cultural mysteries and will have passed into every episode we take on a cultural question, habit or idea, crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters. Barnes & Noble has been the preeminent bookstore chain in America for over three decades, a period full of ups and more recently downs. But in the 1990s, Barnes & Noble was flush. It's super bookstores where customers could get a coffee, a comfy chair, and a best-selling book at a discount took over the country, making business difficult, and not downright impossible, for independent booksellers everywhere.
In this episode, we're going to look at the specific bookstore-on-bookstore conflict that inspired you've got mail, a neighborhood drama immortalized in a Hollywood movie that encapsulates a time that is chronologically not that far away from us, but feels like it might as well be forever ago. It's a story about how we think we know what we ought to be scared of, how we think we know how change will play out, but actually, we have no idea. So today, under codering, remember when Barnes & Noble was the bad guy? The Upper West Side is the famously lefty intellectual Manhattan neighborhood that stretches the length of Central Park, from 59th Street to 110th Street, from the Hudson River to Central Park West.
I should say up front that I am very partial to it. It's where I grew up. And it's where Nora Ephron, who died in 2012, and her sister, the writer Delia Ephron, lived when they were writing the script for You've Got Mail. Here's Delia Ephron.
The Upper West Side, it was our place. We wanted to write about our neighborhood because we loved it. We really loved it. They reset the movie they were adapting, the shop around the corner there.
That film, a lovely romantic comedy starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan as co-workers who are unknowingly exchanging anonymous letters, needed some other updates as well. I mean, it's just a marvelous movie. But they work in the same store. Something very strange happened to me.
I got psychologically mixed up. You don't say it? Yes. I found myself looking at you again and again.
I just couldn't beg my aye, so have you. Oh. And all the time I kept saying to myself, oh no, but what on earth is it not with you? This college is not a particular track and type of man.
I hope you don't mind. No. And at the time that was made, the fact that people didn't express feelings to each other and they were right in front of each other, that was plausible. But it's not plausible when we wrote this film.
So we needed a bigger problem for them. And how could he be basically destroying her life? And that's how we came up with it. It was because of all the changes in the bookstores.
In the early 1990s, the Everless Side was home to a number of independent bookstores, places with names like Griffin, Banks Street Books, Endicot Booksellers, and Shakespeare and Company, which had already appeared in the Nora Ephron scripted when Harry Met Sally. It's the bookstore where Harry and Sally meet, the time they finally become friends. Anyway, at the time of the Ephrons were writing You Got Mail, the bookstores were in turmoil thanks to a new addition to the neighborhood. Why can't two people be together?
Is the central question of a romantic comedy? And in this case, we needed a reason. And the reason seemed to us that he was going to be putting her out of business because Barnes and Noble, I guess, had opened. And we knew that then we thought Barnes and Noble was destroying all the independent.
The Barnes and Noble, as referring to, was a 32,000 square foot store that opened on Broadway and 82nd Street in 1993. It carried 225,000 books, about 10 times more than a regular well stocked bookstore. It's high ceiling first floor, detailed in a company's forest green color scheme, was stuffed with discounted bestsellers, mahogany colored shelves, and racks and racks of magazines. Snuggled up in the corner on the mezzanine was a cafe that served Starbucks.
The second floor ran the entire length of the block and had a festive children's area and dozens of places to sit and read. Do you remember when that Barnes and Noble opened? No, I don't. I feel like I've always been there.
And I'm on to you? Yeah, I do. I remember it opened in like 1993. I was 12, but I spent a lot of time there.
I was very like a new shiny temple of books where they let you read as many magazines as you wanted on the stairs and then you could leave. All these years later, I think this is still the bookstore I have spent the most time in. I have killed so many hours there reading books and magazines waiting for movies to start to meet friends to get picked up by my parents. I think I've even bought a few things.
What I'm trying to say is I love that place. That was just a crazy thing, wasn't it? I mean, thinking that the whole world was coming to an end because of Barnes and Noble. So what explains this crazy thing?
To figure that out, we're going to look at what this particular Barnes and Noble did to the bookstores located right around it, starting with a soulful little children's bookstore named Ears. Ears, which was named after the mopie donkey in Winnie the Pooh, was the first ever independent children's bookstore in New York City. It was founded in 1974 by a man named Joel Fram. I had the idea that it would be almost a quasi-community center where anybody could come in and sit on a pillow and look at books.
I actually talked to a lot of people and asked them, do you think this was a good idea? They just spotted a variable. They said, no, don't do it. I decided to do it anyway.
Really? In 1974, you could just sort of plunge into things. What Joel is saying is that the rent was cheap. For a long time, I lived in a one bedroom apartment on 82nd in Columbus and paid $78 a month rent.
Don't say it. Don't say it. It hurts me. One way things have changed.
You couldn't look at a closet for that now. Well, initially, once again, they talked in 1974. It was $20, $50 a month for the first store. By the 80s, Joel was paying more and Ears had changed locations a couple of times, ending up on Broadway between 78th Street and 79th Street in an extremely compact little space.
It was right across the street from this elegant apartment building that takes up a whole city block called the Appthorp. The Appthorp is where the Ephron sisters lived. Nor Ephron. Ears had a lot of regular customers and a lot of heart.
It was like a little wonderland. Brian Selznick, the illustrator and author of children's books like The Invention of Hugo Cabray, started working at Ears in 1989, soon after graduating from RISD. If I wanted to be a children's book writer and illustrator, that working in a children's book store would be a great education. And so there was a little sign in the window that said they were looking for help and you're given a little quiz when you go in.
And I think everything I knew was basically where the wild things are. The manager sent him off to go study and Selznick dutifully went to the library where he tried to memorize as many children's book titles as possible. I think when I came back, I didn't really know that much more, but I think I might have been one of the first people to actually come back after having been told to go study. The manager hired him and would send him home every night with bags of books.
In short order, Ryan became as knowledgeable as the rest of the staff. I remember the sense of this welcoming embrace when you walk in. There were posters and mobiles and there was a giant witch who was probably in retrospect one of the dirtiest, most disgusting things in New York City. The people who had come into the store was so interesting.
It was a mix of the families from the Upper West Side. There were celebrities. There were people who wanted to become children's book writers or illustrators themselves. There were the musicians.
There was the guy who dressed like he was in a marching band and would always steal Dr. Seuss books. It felt like a real community within a community. Another thing that yours would do was hold writing contests for kids with prompts like, if I were mayor of New York, here's what I do to improve the city.
That particular contest from 1988 got over 400 responses and was written up in the New York Times. I'm going to read you a little quote from that piece. If I were mayor of New York, here's what I do, wrote Willa Pascam, a six-year-old Upper West Side-air. It wouldn't be so dirty on the ground.
I pass a lot that people would throw their garbage in garbage cans and not in the street. I didn't win. It could have been a little more original. But that clipping stayed unrefrigerated for years.
This is all to say, Ears was a local institution and it's not like it was the only game in town. There was a toy there at the block that carried kids books and Shakespeare and Company and two smaller Barnes & Noble's nearby also had children's sections. Even so, into the early 90s, Ears business was doing well. And then a number of things but felt Ears all at once.
And one of them was Barnes & Noble. I did say right, but hey that was catchy. Want seafood just how you like download the Instacart app today and get zero delivery fee on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms of five.
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Each week we hear from some of the most fascinating scholars and thinkers as we tackle big topics, like how whales became the face of environmental activism, how to succeed at failing, and whether public transportation should be free. Go ahead, listen to Free Economics Radio wherever you get your podcasts. A version of Barnes & Noble has been around primarily as a seller of textbooks since the late 1800s, but its modern history starts in 1971 when the last Barnes & Noble was bought by a young man named Len Rijio. Len Rijio grew up in Bensoners Brooklyn and early on in his career, Rijio and the media liked to paint a brash picture of him as a street smart Italian American entrepreneur, upending the Tweety book business.
He was presented as tempestuous and tough and much was made of the fact that his father had been a prize fighter, who twice defeated Rocky Graziano. Years later, when Nora Efron was trying to get him to let her film You Got Mail in a Real Barnes & Noble, she joked to Rijio that if she'd based Joe Fox on him, she would have cast John Travolta, not Tom Hanks. With this fixation, Rijio's ethnic identity obscured the extent to which he fit another type to a tee. Is he a lead to your archetype?
Boris Kachka is the book editor of the LA Times. I'm going to flesh this arc out a bit. In the 1960s, Len Rijio started working at the NYU bookstore. He got turned on to politics, started reading a ton, and at 24 he opened his own shop, the college bookstore, SDX, the student book exchange.
It was down in the village on Waverly Place and he let student radicals use the copy machine. It was so successful he opened a number of other college bookstores across the city. And then in 1971 he purchased Barnes & Noble, a one-story chain that had shriveled to just one store, its flagship on 18th Street and Fifth Avenue, a block from Union Square. Rijio turned the store around.
Independent bookstores at the time could often be cramped, musty, disorganized, snobbish. He put in amenities like benches, bathrooms, signs, phones. He opened on Sundays, but mostly he just stuffed the place with books. Laura J.
Miller is a professor and chair of sociology at Brandeis and the author of Reluctant Capitalist, bookselling, and the culture of consumption. What Barnes & Noble did, going way back to the 1970s, was to be able to say we're going to take this very large piece of real estate in the heart of New York City and pack it full of books so that people could find all kinds of a variety of titles that they didn't even know they were looking for and in many cases they were discounted. By the mid 1970s it built itself as a largest bookstore in the United States and it even had a TV ad campaign. You have any books on electrical wiring?
Sorry. Have you tried Barnes & Noble? Barnes & Noble? Of course.
Of course. Barnes & Noble was primarily a North Eastern chain. But in the 1980s with the backing of a Dutch financier and eventually the junk bond king, Michael Milken, it expanded nationwide. Moving over to the second largest bookstore chain in the country, the shopping center based B Daltins, a chain it would phase out in the 1990s when it started opening Super Stores.
So I want to just talk about Super Stores for a second and the specific kind of Super Store that Barnes & Noble is. Unlike department stores or Walmart, Barnes & Noble doesn't sell everything. It sells everything in one category at a very competitive price, like Home Depot and Toys R Us, which pioneered this particular business model in the 1950s. But think about a Barnes & Noble compared to a Home Depot or a Toys R Us.
They're all huge stores offering a massive selection that puts a lot of pressure on smaller stores selling similar wares. But they don't quite feel the same. Barnes & Noble has something those other chains don't have. It has an ambiance.
It's a place you might want to hang out. But just as Barnes & Noble did invent the Super Store concept, they didn't invent this vibe. That honor belongs to a number of independent bookstores, places like Powell's in Portland, the Tattered Page in Denver, even the original borders in Ann Arbor, that in the 1980s tried to distinguish themselves from the omnipresent shopping center chains, like B Daltins and Walden Books. And they did that by increasing their inventory, having massive selections, and also really changing the atmosphere of bookstores from places that had seemed not very welcoming, places that were maybe kind of musty, where you had to know your way around and good luck to you.
And that did not really provide necessarily a whole lot of space for just hanging out. What Barnes & Noble had of these independent super stores didn't have though was capital. Starting at Ernest in the early 1990s, both Barnes & Noble and its chief rival, the Kmart Backboarders, began to mass-produce this kind of rarefied super bookstore experience, marrying the trappings of an independent with a discount of a chain. And then the first catch again.
One of the things that most defined Barnes & Noble once a web public was that it installed a Starbucks in the store and created a library cafe experience. And Starbucks was the other company that had this insight that they could import a model that felt distinctive in urban to any mall in America. So it's the idea that everyone can live an aspirational lifestyle by going to Barnes & Noble and browsing books. And before that, there were these deserts where you couldn't find it in a 10-foot store and you couldn't have that experience.
So what Barnes & Noble did was it brought that. And in return, it also killed off a lot of head-to-book stores, especially in dense neighborhoods like the iOS side. Because that's the thing. The sort of mass prestige that Barnes & Noble was offering up was compelling in suburbs and excerpts and book deserts.
But it proved to be just as compelling on Barnes & Noble's home turf. New York City. By April of 1993, Barnes & Noble had opened about 135 super bookstores across the country. Still, the 82nd three bars in Noble, the one that inspired You Got Mail, stood out.
I have never been more excited about a store opening. Barnes & Noble CEO Len Rishi told The New York Times. That quote came from a story titled Barnes & Noble's Superstore Proms Volumes of Worry that also included the tidbit that E-Ors was having a 25% off sale to face off with Barnes & Noble's grand opening. What was it like when the Barnes & Noble opened?
It was so upsetting. We were all so horrified and scared. Brian Selznick, the author and illustrator who worked at E-Ors again. Really made you feel like David being threatened by Goliath.
You could just sort of sense this giant corporate monster putting its laser eye out into the world, finding places that had already been proven successful, and then coming in and just cleaning the earth. Brian and the other staffers were reassured that Barnes & Noble couldn't provide the type of knowledge and service that E-Ors did, which is exactly what Meg Ryan's character says in You Got Mail when she's trying to calm her own employees down about the forthcoming Fox Books. A Fox Book Superstore. Keil Knight, Mayor.
It has nothing to do with us. It's big, impersonal, overstocked and full of ignorant salespeople. But they discount. But they don't provide any service?
We do. And this is true, as far as it goes. Which is only so far. Because what Barnes & Noble began to reveal about people who buy books is that sometimes people want knowledgeable, informed, attentive customer service.
And sometimes we just want frictionless anonymity, especially if that's cheaper. Another way to say this is, part of what was appealing about Barnes & Noble was its less intimate service. The way you could disappear there, the spot in the middle of the city or the shopping center, where you could literally take a nap if that's what you wanted to do. It was a place where no one knew your name and might not have the perfect recommendation, but you could leave crumbs in the magazines.
And you don't have to ask anyone to use the bathroom, which definitely wasn't just for customers. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but this hands-off approach presaged not only the appeal of an even more frictionless, even more generic, even cheaper electronic bookseller. It presaged customer service delivered by chatbot and adds on the subway for food delivery services. The promise if you use them, you won't even have to talk to another human being on the phone.
In the 1990s though, this was all far away and Barnes & Noble was offering up a new shiny anonymized space, almost a public space. At a time when people freed from their desks by laptop computers for the first time, could utilize a so-called third place, one that wasn't their home or their office, more than ever before. This is all to say, that despite the knowledge, the service, the community already on offer at half a dozen bookstores in the neighborhood. The Barnes & Noble on 82nd and Broadway was a hit, and the other bookstores around it suffered as a result.
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You may think joint stiffness comes later in life, but people in their 30s and 40s already feel it. Why? Because collagen production naturally declines in your 30s, impacting joints. And even before the Barnes and Noble opened, Ewers was having problems.
The biggest of which was that business was just down. Talking to people that Barnes and Noble's rise heard this a lot, that stores just eking it out, found that they could no longer compete once the mega stores arrived. Laura J. Miller again.
People went into book selling in the past, rarely because they wanted to make a lot of money because it was not a business where you can make money, or at least not much of it. Now it's a mistake to say Leonard Riggio didn't or doesn't care about books. He went into the book business at a relatively young age and stayed with it for his working life. But Barnes and Noble also, and Leonard Riggio at its helm, figured out a way to make a whole lot of money from this.
And in doing so, it became, it helped to transform book selling into an extremely competitive field. In August of 1993, four months after the Barnes and Noble had opened, Ewers closed. I was sad about it. In the years afterwards, a number of other neighborhood stores would follow suit.
Endicots, a general interest bookstore on Columbus Avenue closed too. When it did, the owner told The New Yorker, there are three words for why we're going under and the words are Barnes and Noble. In 1996, Shakespeare and Company, the store most famous in Upper West Side lore for battling Barnes and Noble, closed after a long public and protracted battle involving protests and calls for boycotts. No less a percentage than Tony Morrison told The New York Times that Shakespeare and Co's disappearance is melancholy and outrageous.
These closings mirrored what was happening to independent bookstores across the city and the country. Throughout the 1990s, membership in the ABA, the American Booksellers Association, felt from 5,500 to 3,100. By 2005, it would be down to 1,702. General interest bookstores were hit hard, but this is also when women's bookstores, gay and lesbian bookstores and African American bookstores began to permanently disappear.
In 1998, the ABA sued Barnes and Noble and Borders rewarded alleged or monopolistic practices, using their size to get discounts and preferential treatment from publishers and demanding additional fees from those publishers for in-store displays. There was a real fear that independent bookstores wouldn't survive, and this was coupled with a real disdain for superstore chains among bookstore owners and certain kinds of writers and readers, who saw them as having a chilling effect that actually a phrase I saw used on the culture, stocking only what was already popular and using unfair business practices to replace community bookstores with something phony and commodified. But this sentiment would not have gotten such a memorable and mainstream airing had it not been for you've got mail. Do you want the website to become one big gigantic strip mall?
Do you want to get off the subway? I said a second and Broadway and not even know you're in New York City? Can we save the shop around the corner? By fictionalizing the story of a little bookstore shut down by a giant new bookstore that's offering customers something irresistible but hollow, the movie charmingly and persuasively made the argument that Barnes and Noble was no good.
In the film, Fox Books' Triumph over the shop around the corner is presented as inevitable but awful, an example of false progress where customers got something more affordable and convenient but not better, a bookseller with no higher calling than Filthy Luka. When Joel Fran read about the movie in the newspaper, he sent Nora Ephron a note. For all that you've got mail crystallized an argument against Barnes and Noble, it didn't include the thing that would eventually make the villainization of Barnes and Noble seem so quaint. It didn't include Amazon.
Since being founded in Jeff Bezos' Seattle Garage in 1994, Amazon has upended everything. Using supercharged versions of some of Barnes and Noble's own tactics, ease, vast selections, and steep discounts, Amazon has replaced Barnes and Noble as the goliath of the book business and not just the book business. This didn't happen overnight though. In 1999, Barnes and Noble was still so powerful that Jeff Bezos could straight-face it least and say of it, goliath is always in range of a good slingshot, meaning Bezos and Amazon were the David's of the situation.
Well into the 2000s, Barnes and Noble maintained its pole position but was more fixated on its competition with borders than on solving the internet. Boris Kachka again. The nail in the coffin really was the 2008 recession which was a huge starting mechanism for industries in the US but that was the year that the number of Barnes and Noble books first closing started outpacing the number of stores opening. The decade after the Great Recession was hard for the Superbook stores.
At the end of 2010, Borders declared bankruptcy. Though Barnes and Noble is still the largest physical seller of books in America, sales and revenue have consistently declined. It went through six CEOs in a decade. The former Overdog is so widely understood to become an underdog that in 2013 the Onion ran an article of the title, Fox Books Files for bankruptcy.
E-commerce's effect on just about every kind of physical business has erased some of the distinctions between types of brick and mortar stores that once seemed so important. If Barnes and Noble and independent bookstores were once apples and oranges, now they're both in danger of getting juiced. Not that the independents are doing as badly as Barnes and Noble. The two thousand tens are when independent bookstores began to stabilize, increasing their numbers for the first time in decades.
The stores that survived being undercut by the super stores and then Amazon and the ones that have opened since have figured out how to make themselves indispensable and financially sound. They understand their markets and their customers and they're offering them something they can't get online. Meanwhile Barnes and Noble no longer luxe and shiny inhabit of a twix in between space. Not Amazon but not quite shopping local.
It's trying to change that though. In 2019, the company went private again, selling to a hedge fund that will give each shop more discretion around the titles they carry. A strategy that worked when it helped turn around the UK's own big chain, Waterstones. In other words, after everything, the plan is to make each Barnes and Noble super store feel more like an independent bookstore.
There's a moment towards the end of You Got Mail when Meg Ryan is talking about her store closing. People are always telling you that change is a good thing. But all they're really saying is that something you didn't want to happen at all has happened. My store is closing this week.
I own a store. Did I ever tell you that? It's a lovely store. And in a week it will be something really depressing, like a baby gap.
Soon we'll just be a memory. In fact, someone, some foolish person will probably think it's a tribute to the city. The way it keeps changing on you, or the way you can ever count on it, or something. I know because that's the sort of thing I'm always saying.
But the truth is, I'm heartbroken. I think this is the toughest part of the whole movie. I don't mean to sit through. I mean, the part of the movie that's the most challenging.
Because this is what we are inclined to do. Lament change and then get used to it. Even start to feel attached to it. But what Meg Ryan is saying here is that even when this happens, even when we accept change, embrace it, even when we feel nostalgic about all the gaps that used to litter this neighborhood, we shouldn't forget that it isn't necessarily productive.
It isn't necessarily progress. Just because we don't mind it doesn't mean it got better. It's just what we got used to. It's a pretty serious idea to smuggle into a feel good movie.
And one that, in retrospect, seems maybe a little overheated in the context of Barnes and Noble itself. I mean, Barnes and Noble is a physical place that pays local taxes, employees people who live nearby, and where you can still go hang out and buy an actual book. Sort of seems like we were overreacting. Change isn't always bad.
But that's actually what the story is about. How we can't tell if we're overreacting in the moment, because we have no idea what is going to happen. All sorts of things we think about all the time weren't yet imaginable when you got mail came out. The movie can't imagine a world in which computers, instead of bringing us together, might actually just keep us apart.
It can't imagine a world in which Starbucks is the most pedestrian place to get a coffee. It can't imagine a world in which romantic comedies are at the movies a dying format. It can't imagine a world in which all brick and mortar stores are under threat from the internet, except maybe the ones that are as singular as the shop around the corner. After everything, the Upper West Side got its bookstores back.
The end of Cut Space was until recently another bookstore. Shakespeare and Company, under New Management, returned to the neighborhood. But even a children's bookstore now, an outpost of Books of Wonder, which inspired the look of Megraian store in You Got Mail, and that opened on 84th Street in 2018. The 82nd Street Barnes & Noble is, thank goodness, still there, but another Barnes & Noble, on 66th Street, closed at the very beginning of 2011.
When it did, The New York Times ran a piece full of lamentations from people who basically never bought anything there, but did very much enjoy hanging out. Barnes & Noble may have arrived in the neighborhood as some air-set solo-spig box store rolling over the little guy, but enough time passes, enough things change, and that air-set solo-spig box store turns out it's a community center, too. Now, like, we simply heartbroken if something happened, and there are always rumors going around. Oh, Barnes & Noble was, you know, and it's just terrible.
This is Decodering, I'm Willa Paskin. You can find me on Twitter at willapaskin, and if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com. If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed and Apple podcasts, or ever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends.
This podcast was written by Willa Paskin and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode. Decodering is produced by Willa Paskin and Benjamin Frisch. Cleo Levin is our research assistant. A special thanks to Steve Gack, Maris Kreismann, Emma Straub, Jacob Bernstein, Gary Hoover, Peter Glassman, and June Thomas.
Thanks for listening. We'll see you in a few weeks.