When I was a kid growing up in Jersey City, we had a single first-run bookstore called Pritchard’s occupying a cramped space next to the old Public Service bus terminal in the heart of Journal Square.
Then the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey – the same folks who aided and abetted in the recent Bridgegate snafu – built that monstrosity, the Journal Square Transportation Center, and promptly ruined the Square.
Their machinations in reshaping the retail space around what we used to call the Hudson & Manhattan Tube ended up hiking rents and displacing longtime tenants – including Pritchard’s – leaving a city with more than 200,000 residents bereft of for-sale books.
Thank goodness, we still had the Public Library and the two college libraries (assuming you had access). But still, no bookstore?
Only in the past year did we get one and, sometime this year, we may have two. Glory be!
Not that long ago, Hoboken – the city of yuppies that’s been home to now-ex-Gov. Corzine and now-U.S. Sen. Menendez – lost its Barnes & Noble.
Now, it appears that Rizzoli Bookstore will soon be gone from W. 57th St. in Manhattan to make way for big-time developers’ projects. This comes in the wake of the B&N at Sixth Ave. and Eighth St. folding its tent. And on and on.
In the scheme of things, does it matter? Does it mean that fewer folks are willing to support the cause of literacy? Or that many of us just can’t afford the price of a hardcover book in this economy? Or that we’ve abandoned the written word for the Kindle reader or the Internet. Maybe we just want instant information from Google; we don’t want to ruminate over a best seller, a spellbinding mystery, a sci-fi puzzler or a tasty biography.
When I was a fourth-grader, I remember being so engrossed in the book I was reading (which I’d brought from home), I was oblivious to the fact that our class had begun reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. And I was promptly chastised by my teacher for doing so.
Well, I haven’t quite shaken the habit of allowing the printed page to take me on an unscheduled adventure of the mind. So all I can say is, please support your local library because it may turn out to be the last resource for a hungry mind.
Still unconvinced about the need for gun control legislation?
Well, here’s another reminder: A 4-year-old kid was fatally shot by his cousin as they were playing in the victim’s Detroit home on Jan. 16, according to the Detroit Free Press.
The cousin, a 4-year-old girl, dragged a loaded rifle out from under a bed, aimed the gun at the boy and pulled the trigger, hitting her cousin in the chest, police reported.
Finally, from the Department of What Could They Be Thinking?, there was this development from the Country Down Under:
The people running the Australia Tennis Open didn’t suspend play even though the temperature exceeded the 100 degree mark for four days. Apparently, officials didn’t feel the conditions that disabled several players and many spectators met their “extreme heat” specifications so as to justify closing the roof or shutting down the proceedings.
Just a little dab of sunscreen, a cap, and you’ve got it made in the shade, right?
– Ron Leir
