The Mystery Men Hoping to Keep St. Mark’s Bookshop Alive
by Brendan O’Connor
A photo posted by nana. (@jjoongie) on Dec 8, 2015 at 1:56pm PST
Recently, the New York City Housing Authority sued St. Mark’s Bookshop, one of its tenants, on the ground floor of the First Houses, at 138 East 3rd Street, in the East Village, for more than $68,000 in back rent. According to court documents, NYCHA issued St. Mark’s its first rent demand on June 26th, 2015, informing the long-struggling bookstore that it owed $18,374.34 for April, May, and June. At that point, St. Mark’s had been the city’s tenant for just over a year, since leaving its previous home on the ground floor of a Cooper Union dorm. The housing authority filed a petition on October 5th; the bookstore’s initial defense was to claim that the necessary parties had not been appropriately informed of the demand for back rent, and that too much time had passed to come knocking for it now.
One day after the city filed a very convincing cross-motion, Bob Contant — the sole remaining owner of the store — announced on Facebook that the bookstore had secured an unnamed “investor” who “has proposed to take over our lease and pay the back rent if we can raise enough money to stock the store.” Described by the New York Post as a “mystery mogul” and “publicity-shy magnate” (and characterized by Contant as “a serious book person and buyer”) the investor is “acting as a friend,” Contant told the Village Voice. Actually, “he” is more than one person. “I’m one,” Charles FitzGerald, who is named as the assignee on the bookstore’s original lease with NYCHA, told me on the phone, laughing. “There are several.”
FitzGerald came to the East Village in 1959 from the West Village, moving into the building at 11 St. Mark’s Place. A few years later, he opened a store there, before moving to 9 St. Mark’s Place. After forty years in business — during which time he bought and sold several buildings in the neighborhood — FitzGerald decided to retire as a merchant and fully embrace his status as a landlord in an up-and-coming area. “He still loves the neighborhood, but he wants to use the income he could earn by leasing the store to buy land in Maine, and with commercial rents on St. Marks Place climbing, the timing is right,” the New York Times reported in a 2005 story about the neighborhood’s changing retail market. And so he has. “Land conservation is my great purpose,” Fitzgerald told me. He’s acquired thousands of acres of land in Maine since the sixties, including six thousand acres that are under easement and to remain forever wild, and another 3,000 to be retained as organic farms. “I’ve always had my hands in the dirt, since I was six years old,” he said. He also owns a house and a beach shack on Martha’s Vineyard, and he still owns 9 St. Marks Place, 12 St. Marks Place, and a fifty percent stake in 33 St. Marks Place.
As it happens, the bookstore used to be one of FitzGerald’s tenants, before it moved into a building owned by Cooper Union, in the early nineties. “That bookstore has a legacy of quite a few debts,” FitzGerald said. “You need substantial capital to stock a bookstore.” He ought to know — he gave the store $50,000 in 2014 to restock its shelves after the move. “I love books. Hate digital,” FitzGerald said. “You couldn’t invent something better than a book.” He still wants to help, but doesn’t want to put good money after bad. “It cannot be revived unless there’s a clean slate,” he said, describing a plan to start a new store under a different name, paying Contant and Terry McCoy, who co-owned the store until very recently, to run things as salaried employees. He does not, however, want to do it alone: “I would probably not assume the lease unless the capital was there.” FitzGerald, though, isn’t the one working to raise that capital. “I don’t know who’s out there,” he told me. That responsibility has fallen to a man named Rafay Khalid, who covered the bookstore’s $22,000 down payment on its lease with NYCHA. “I love books,” Khalid told me over the phone. “I’m not wealthy.”
“I do things quietly and I get things done,” Khalid, who was initially reluctant to be named in this story, but relented, said. “This is a lot of work, but I keep quiet about it.” Khalid first came to be involved in St Mark’s Bookshop in 2014, when he served on a thirteen-person committee, the purpose of which was to guide the store during its change of location. Khalid, an investment analyst at Global Credit Services who volunteers at Word Up Books, in Washington Heights, told me that he’s also supported Red Emma’s, a radical, horizontally-organized bookstore in Baltimore, which he sees as a model for what St. Mark’s Bookshop could be. “Rafay was instrumental in connecting Red Emma’s with NYC-based co-op lender, The Working World, when we were looking to finance our expansion in 2013. He’s been an enthusiastic supporter of the work we do, but there’s no financial connection,” worker-owner Kate Khatib, one of Red Emma’s eight co-founders, told me in an email.
Khalid said he hopes to raise at least $200,000 to support his and FitzGerald’s plan to give the bookstore a fresh start — $100,000 of that has already been put towards building out the new space in the NYCHA building*. (Clouds Architecture Office designed the new store, which won an AIANY Design award last year.) Now, “All we need are books,” Khalid said. “If there are books in the store, people will come in.”
Well, that’s not all they need — there is still the matter of NYCHA’s money. “They may be amenable to a positive settlement,” James West, the East Village attorney representing the bookstore, told Bedford & Bowery early last month. “I mean, they don’t really need the back rent.” Actually, they do: more than seventy-five percent of NYCHA’s buildings are more than forty years old, and require approximately $17 billion in unmet capital needs — and a deficit that could balloon to $2.5 billion in the next ten years. West has not responded to multiple emailed requests for comment, and the voice mailbox at his office was full.
What Khalid and FitzGerald propose, and what they hope the city will agree to, is a new lease, with a new company — under a new name, Khalid said repeatedly — that will pay a higher rent than it is currently paying. In return, it will forgive the back rent. FitzGerald, any investors, and a management committee will direct how to allocate any funds raised, including whatever is left of the money Khalid hopes to raise. (St. Mark’s Bookshop is also running a Gofundme with a $150,000 target.) “I think of this as a startup,” Khalid said. “St. Mark’s 2.0.”
Correction: This piece originally misspelled Bob Contant’s last name; it is Contant as in “content,” but with a different vowel, not Conant as in Scott Conant who ran some cool restaurants for a while.
*Correction 2: Khalid has not raised $200,000 but wants to — this sentence has been updated to reflect that.
