Hedge Funds vs. Bookstores: The Quiet War on Village Culture

By Erik DuRon

I co-own Left Bank Books, a used and rare bookshop specializing in literature and the arts. My business partner and I are the fourth owners of the shop since the early 1990s, with 41 Perry Street its third location in the West Village. The transformation of the neighborhood into a wealthy suburb of finance capital threatens our survival like nothing in the shop’s 30+ year history, including Covid-19.

The bookshop is a hole in the wall, but in the sense that Jane Jacobs meant, a small hub for creative social interaction, a place from which to keep “eyes on the street.” We hold mail and keys for our neighbors, report damaged streetlights to 311. Regular customers bring us coffee. We acquire most of our books from the handful of folks who’ve been in the neighborhood for decades and are still hanging on. In this way we retain a little bit of the old Village and offer it back, recreating the type of little mom and pop shops I remember growing up here in the 1970s and 80s.

My single mother moved my brother and me to Greenwich Village from Park Slope in 1975. We lived in a pre-war Bing & Bing building and I attended P.S. 41. My mother owned a children’s clothing boutique, the City Mouse, on Greenwich Avenue, next door to the old Star Thrower cafe. She sold batik shirts and hand-painted jeans. When she got robbed at gunpoint one too many times, she decided to close. She managed to keep us in the Village, though, eventually settling into a job as a bookkeeper. Today I couldn’t dream of affording to live here.

One year after we opened Left Bank Books on Perry Street, Covid-19 hit. We closed for four months, got some PPP money from the government, and increased our email marketing campaigns. I would take the empty train from Brooklyn to the shop once a week to pack and ship orders. It wasn’t easy, but our regular customers came through for us and we weathered the worst of it. Difficult as that time was for business, it was nothing compared to the construction project next door we’ve had to endure over the last four years.

Two townhouses dating to the 1850s, and combined into a multi-unit apartment building in the early 1900s, are being converted into a 6,800 square-foot single-family mansion where, according to Forbes, “the plans include a wine cellar and Turkish bath, with a terrace on the parlor floor and a roof deck with Empire State Building views.” The owner is a hedge-fund manager whose enterprise has “an emphasis on alternative assets and a passion for sharing knowledge,” according to its website. Some of the tenants who were pushed out were our customers, as well as being customers of other shops, bodegas, bars and restaurants in the neighborhood, all of which depend on foot traffic and an ever-diminishing street culture.

Anyone in New York will be familiar with the bone-rattling sound of jackhammers, the rumbling of cement mixers, the nerve-wracking spectacle of giant cranes dangling I-beams above the street. Over four years we’ve dealt with all of these and more: sidewalk barricades, street closures, piles of debris forcing people to cross the street, idle construction workers, scaffolding blocking our light and creating a harbor where homeless people urinate and drug users leave needles and the occasional used condom. Thick construction dust layers our shelves and books, clogging the AC and air washer, and affecting our lungs. Dumpster-loads of earth dug up to accommodate the wine cellar and Turkish bath are loaded onto heavy trucks that can barely maneuver down the narrow streets. On and on and on.

This has had consequences for the quality of our work lives and mental health. And it has had real consequences for our business. Sales have dropped 15-20 percent since construction began in 2021. While this may owe something to post-Covid inflation, and now to tariff shock, I’m convinced the fall-off has much more to do with the construction, and the general hollowing out of the neighborhood that is the result of this kind of economic transformation.

Late last year I met the wife of the hedge-fund manager for the first time. She visited the shop and we talked about the ways the renovation was disruptive both to us and to her family. She’s eager to move in before the school year so her kids can have an easy transition to their new school. She expressed concern and promised to be on site more and to do what she could to minimize further disruptions. But when yet another sidewalk closure occurred, during our busy fall season, I emailed her to address the issue head-on, and to request a meeting where we might discuss some sort of restitution. She didn’t respond. I began to document internet outages and piles of debris and power generators rumbling and belching smoke, and sent her photos and videos, but she continued to ignore me. Because everything was proceeding by the book, with the proper permits and no apparent violations, she and her husband must have felt they bore no responsibility toward us, their soon-to-be neighbors.

Recently, I encountered the hedge-fund manager on a site visit. When I invited him into the shop to talk, he declined. I pressed the matter, mentioning the unacknowledged emails, and everything we’ve had to put up with. He looked at me with the hint of a smile and the utmost composure, seemingly above it all, and said, “It’ll be over soon.” This is true, and I can’t express how much I look forward to it. But what will the neighborhood be after the next luxury building conversion, and the one after that? A better response would have been: “We’re your neighbors. How can we help?” But as Jane Jacobs wrote, decades ago: “We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.”