Change seems to come naturally to some areas. Gentrifying post-industrial swaths of Brooklyn and Queens, perhaps, are used to blocks that morph in quick time.
But differences may be harder to swallow in more established neighborhoods, such as the Upper West Side, where the enclave along Broadway once known as Bloomingdale is about to lose a bookstore, an outpost of 40-year-old city fixture Shakespeare & Co. that announced its closing this month.
To be fair, the store hasn’t been around forever. It opened about a year ago at 2736 Broadway. But its departure will come on the heels of the shuttering this month of beloved Silver Moon Bakery across the street. And as some residents, brokers and business owners point out, the exit is happening after the block has experienced a slow erosion through the years of gyms, jazz clubs and cafes, though the trend of a shifting retail landscape is certainly not limited to there.
“This is a great neighborhood. We believe that bookstores in general are very important to our culture. And we did our best,” Shakespeare & Co. CEO Dane Neller, who has helmed the company since 2015, told Crain’s. “But the store just didn’t achieve the sales we need to make it a long-term sustainable business.”
Shakespeare & Co. and the Upper West Side have gone hand in hand for a long time. In 1983 the company opened its first shop on West 81st Street and Broadway but reportedly closed it in 1996 after being unable to match the deep discounts of a Barnes & Noble a block north. (Luxury condo tower 250 W. 81st St. now occupies the former Shakespeare site.)
But the bookseller returned to the area in 2018 with a store at 2020 Broadway, near West 69th Street, which endures to this day as one of the chain’s two surviving Manhattan locations. The other is at 939 Lexington Ave. on the Upper East Side.
Still, it seems unfair to blame the Upper West Side for Shakespeare & Co.’s imminent failure. Stores to shutter previously include versions at 716 Broadway in Greenwich Village, 1 Whitehall St. in FiDi and 137 E. 23rd St. in Gramercy.
For his part, Neller, the former CEO of gourmet grocery chain Dean & DeLuca, which closed most of its stores in 2019 and later filed for bankruptcy protection, seemed to acknowledge change can be hard to process but at least in the business world is sometimes inevitable. “We are in a fast-moving retail world, that’s for sure,” he said.
2736 Broadway
This well-kept 14-story, 70-unit mixed-use building was once part of Jack Fine’s Jafin Properties portfolio, which reportedly ran into financial trouble in the 1970s and was later carved up and sold off. In the 1980s tenants purchased the 158,000-square-foot corner property, whose residential portion goes by 230 W. 105th St., and incorporated it as a co-op. Eager to assist the site’s four retail tenants during Covid, the co-op board relaxed their rents, which conversely led to raising residential maintenance fees by 15%. (A fifth-floor studio with a windowed kitchen now on the market for $435,000 comes with a monthly maintenance bill of $892, according to its StreetEasy listing.) In 2023 No. 2736’s longtime women’s apparel store Steps Clothing Co. closed. Replacing it the next year was a branch of book vendor Shakespeare & Co., though it didn’t last long; the store announced its closure earlier this month. “Our landlords are nice people, and I have no complaints about them at all. It’s more of a retail issue,” said Shakespeare owner Dane Neller, who added that the last day may not be in April as previously reported but will occur when the current inventory is depleted. While other neighborhood berths have seen a revolving door of tenants, No. 2736 enjoys some mainstays: an 11-year-old outpost of Plowshares Coffee Roasters, the deli Convenience Grocery and Andrade Shoe Repair, whose shimmering pink-and-green boot-shaped sign may bring a smile to fans of neon.
2740 Broadway
Some landlords may not be well known but still exercise an almost singular control over the look and feel of blocks. Consider Broadside Realty Corp., which since at least the mid-20th century has controlled the entire eastern side of Broadway between West 105th and West 106th streets including this multi-storefront address. Queens-based husband-and-wife duo Stanley and Chrysanthe Rose ran the family real estate business for decades. But recent years have seen an eruption of legal battles over control of the family’s holdings among their children. The fights appear to have pitted the couple’s son, Michael Rose, against his stepsisters, Georgia Stamoulis and Helen Rose, as well as Helen Rose’s son Aris Taflambas, according to numerous court filings. Former Le Pain Quotidien baker Judith Norell reportedly once called Stamoulis about leasing space at No. 2740 for a new cafe, which Stamoulis apparently approved on the condition that she could become a co-owner. Silver Moon Bakery, which opened at the end of 2000, was the result. But after a 25-year run, the purveyor of pastries and tarts closed on March 23. And it came after Broadside, now run by Michael Rose, sued to evict his sister’s business for its alleged failure to leave after Silver Moon’s lease expired in May. Broadside also claims Silver Moon owes $200,000 in back rent. But Norell says Rose refused to cash rent checks in an effort to force her out. The 2-story, 8,600-square-foot commercial property is also home to martial arts studio Broadway TaeKwonDo, wine store Broadway Cellar and Casa Hardware & Locksmith, though the berth once occupied by Blondi’s Hair Salon has been vacant for years. According to court records, Broadside sued Blondi’s in 2024 for allegedly skipping out on $232,000 in rent.
2726 Broadway
Gobble a Big Mac and sweat it off upstairs at this 3-story, 9,400-square-foot site, which offers a McDonald’s restaurant on the ground floor and the gym BeFitNYC above it. Seized by city authorities in the early 1970s for back taxes, according to the city register, the 31-foot-wide prewar building was sold in 1992 through an auction for $800,000 to the Flatbush-based firm 2726 Broadway Realty Corp. In 2020 the company refinanced the property with a $3.5 million mortgage from Investors Bank; company executive Israel Zion signed for the loan, the register shows. No. 2726 is worth $4.2 million in the eyes of city appraisers, a value that has barely budged in a decade, tax records show. McDonald’s, which at the end of last year had 48 restaurants in Manhattan and 188 in New York overall, has been growing in the city while other chains retreat, adding three sites in 2024, according to “State of the Chains” data from the think tank Center for an Urban Future. But Dunkin’ still stands head and shoulders above the fast food pack with 626 overall sites, the group said. BeFit, meanwhile, offers classes in Tai Chi, cross-training and calisthenics; memberships are $120 per month. Also on-site is the studio Bridge for Dance, where young dancers can enroll in a once-weekly, 15-week program for about $700.
2758 Broadway
Broadside Realty Corp., Silver Moon’s former landlord, also owns this corner site, a 3-story, 5,600-square-foot building in the Beaux-Arts style that’s currently vacant after a changing parade of commercial tenants. In the 1940s it contained La Primadora, a vendor of “Havana cigars,” a tax photo shows. By the 1970s the building, which has also used the address 250 W. 106th St., was home to offices for the once-powerful political group Riverside Democratic Club, and in the 1980s, it housed a pro-tenant firm that organized rent strikes. In recent years, however, its upper and lower floors have largely been home to gyms. In 2015 Italian eatery Macchina opened on the ground floor, though it lasted only two years. Successor Il Gatto Nero had an even shorter run of just a few months in 2018. Broadside, which operates properties owned by the Rose family, appears to have had No. 2758 in its portfolio since at least the 1960s, which is as far back as digital property records go. In December Michael Rose refinanced the mortgage that covered No. 2758 and six other sites in the neighborhood with a $17 million note from Flushing Bank, according to the city register. What’s planned next at the site is unclear from city building permits, but No. 2758 has been undergoing interior renovations for months.
2751 Broadway
Evenings have been melodic for decades on the strip, courtesy of a pair of jazz joints at this address. The first was Augie’s, whose opening date is unclear but which closed in 1998. A bartender there, Paul Stache, then opened the berth’s next musical iteration, Smoke Jazz & Supper Club, which he still operates today with his co-owner and wife, Molly Johnson, who also once tended bar there. The pandemic did force Smoke to close from 2020 to 2022, but it used the time to absorb two next-door storefronts that had held a dry cleaners and attorney’s office and offers a larger 80-guest venue today. The 7-story, 41,800-square-foot prewar structure that houses the club, a part of the Riverside-West End Historic District, was constructed by Danish immigrant Henry Andersen in 1898 as The Westbourne, an apartment house for middle-class families. But like several nearby sites, the Westbourne, which also uses the address 930 West End Ave., appears to have become a single-room occupancy hotel in the Great Depression. Seized by city officials in the late 1980s for unpaid taxes and slapped with a vacate order, according to the city register, No. 930 was reborn in 1987 by developer West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing as a 128-unit affordable housing site. Residents, some formerly homeless, have their own bedrooms but share amenities. City appraisers, who tend to undervalue sites, put the building’s worth at $5.5 million, which is down slightly from its recent peak in 2021 of $6.8 million, tax records show.
255 W. 105th St.
Occupying the entirety of the wedge-shaped parcel at this address, which extends from Broadway to West End Avenue, is The Clebourne, a 13-story, 60-unit co-op completed in 1913. It once offered drivers a porte-cochere driveway on the 105th Street side, though shareholders apparently redesigned it years ago to cut it off from cars after improper parking became a problem. A three-bedroom unit with a formal dining room, a spacious foyer and three exposures traded upstairs in the fall for $2.9 million, the city register shows. In 1913 Russian immigrant Harry Schiff, who completed several similar projects in the neighborhood, developed the Clebourne, which also uses 924 West End Ave. For land for the building, Schiff had to purchase the former country house of retail mogul Isidor Straus, a Macy’s department store owner, and his wife, Ida Straus, both of whom died in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. A small park a block away commemorates their lives and features a stone fountain inscribed with a Biblical verse: “Lovely and pleasant were they in their lives. And in their death they were not divided.” According to Schiff’s 1939 obituary in The New York Times, the developer’s home for many years was the Hotel Monterey, a once-elegant edifice at 215 W. 94th St. that turned seedy in the 1970s. No. 255’s retail space, home to the Birdland jazz club from 1986 to 1996, offers the appropriately named restaurant The Ellington today.
2728 Broadway
Financial distress in the latter half of the 20th century turned some apartment buildings into flophouses or worse. Others, acquired by the city’s department of Housing Preservation and Development at their low points, evolved into Housing Development Fund Corporation co-ops, limited-equity residences that cap sale prices in exchange for tax breaks. About 1,100 of the unusual co-ops exist today, including this 5-story, 16-unit property, which appears to have undergone its conversion in the late 1970s. The 14,300-square-foot walk-up has a commercial space whose tenants are frequently in flux. Businesses since World War II have included Crane Pharmacy, Eden Bar, Japanese restaurant Tokyo Pop, Angelina Pizza Bar and Papasito Mexican Grill, based on photos and news reports. Riverside Wine & Liquors arrived in 2013, its third stop in the neighborhood in about a decade; it previously stood at 2730 Broadway before relocating to 2746 Broadway. Accompanying each move was the store’s distinctive neon sign, a pink and grooved creation simply stating “Liquors.” But the sign was short-lived at No. 2728 because it apparently lacked a proper permit. It had vanished by 2016, leaving the blank brick band there today. According to a store manager, the sign’s whereabouts are unknown, though he added, for solace, that a version atop a shop at 1361 Lexington Ave. on the Upper East Side is nearly a dead ringer.
