Best Bookstore in the City: Housing Works Bookstore Café

by Shaw Malcolm

In the conflict between independent bookstores and their corporate counterparts, it's relatively easy to lose track of the fact that not all independents are worth your automatic patronage, your time, or your dough. A marketing factoid such as Strand's “18 miles of books” sounds eerily parallel to the option of “super-sizing,” or to the Starbuckian notion of a fabricated “third place.”

To find a great bookstore in New York, first you have to strip away the layers of marketing blather and ask a very reasonable and often over-looked question: Do the people who run the store care about you as much as they do about selling product?

At the Housing Works Bookstore Café, the answer is an emphatic yes.

Couched among warehouses, shops, and galleries at 126 Crosby Street, between Houston and Prince Streets in Soho, the Housing Works Bookstore Café was started in 1996 as a business venture of the larger Housing Works agency, itself founded in 1990 to address the significant lack of housing and services for New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS.

The organization has grown substantially since then, extending its businesses to thrift shops, a catering company, and its bookstore café in Soho. When you buy anything at the bookstore—a book, a cup of coffee, a pastry, a concert ticket—your money is channeled into Housing Works’ social programs. But don't expect to be bombarded by the mission and principles of the place; the staff and volunteers there are conscious of making sure the information is available, albeit a little too subtly.

To fulfill a mission like Housing Works' requires community—but can we say that we have in this city an actual literary community? Or do we make up a massive, ultimately disconnected collection of writers and readers who have bought into the publisher-centric, Barnes and Noble model of literary promotion? Have we so finely honed our voices that, in turn, we have lost our ability to listen to ourselves and each other in the fervor of our own eloquence?

I spoke with Susie Lupert, a manager at the bookstore. Lupert knows how to balance business with social consciousness. Over beers at Tom and Jerry's, with Jimi Hendrix on the stereo and the moving wallpaper of Nights of Cabiria washing over a massive projector screen on the back wall, we talked about the store's manifestations and present direction.

Easy to talk with and quick to laugh, she helped to unravel some of the narrative that you're not going to find on the store's website (which is embarrassingly unrepresentative of the store's depth): “There's unfortunately not a lot of known history because no one has been there since its inception. No staff that is there now has been there for ten years, which is a real bummer, because we've lost a lot of institutional memory as a result, and we've made a lot of the same mistakes that I'm sure we made ten years ago. But I also know that when it did first open, it was literally just random boxes of books on the floor, and really had kind of a Salvation Army feel to it.”

“It's developed into what we'd like to think is a premier used bookstore,” Lupert said. “That's a result of managers over the years seeking out specific donations from publishers, becoming this literary hub that we want to be by getting famous writers to join us and having our board of directors be more actively involved.”

Mission statements aside, it’s easy to get lost in the Bookstore Café. The interior was designed for warmth, for the look and feel of someone's private library or living room, and over the years certain elements of the décor, such as the column shelving, were added. There are two levels of books: ground level and on the u-shaped catwalk over the front-half of the store. In the back half, the distance between the various tables and chairs is minimal, drawing friends and strangers closer together. In the southwest corner of the space is the café. (Few things can match browsing the shelves with a Stella dangling from your hand.) When there's a concert (which happens at least once a month, during their "Live from Home" series), lit candles and stage lights illuminate the embrace of books around you, and the result is a distinct intimacy.

The assessment of Housing Works’ importance can’t stop at the surface. What differentiates Housing Works from other bookstores? According to Lupert, “There's something very organic about the place that I've never seen at another non-profit. I've worked for a non-profit where the people we were helping were so far removed that it never felt like we were really helping people. And at Housing Works you can't get away from it. It's constant.”

“At the bookstore you know that you're really helping people,” Lupert said. “We only have ten staff members, and two of them are former clients who graduated from our job training program and now work full-time.”

With minimal paid staff, the store relies immensely on volunteers. The store, in fact, receives the help of approximately 200 volunteers each week, and hand-in-hand with less overhead comes the inevitable inconsistencies and lack of accountability seemingly inherent in such numbers. Still, as Lupert points out, the volunteers are at the core of the store's success: "The community that exists at Housing Works, that I do believe people feel when they come in—it happened naturally, and it happened because of the volunteers.”

Also at the heart of the store's success is the events series, the prominence and consistency of which has been the result of staff efforts in conjunction with the store's advisory board, a group of individuals whose connections dive deep into music, publishing, and politics. With those relationships, the staff, for years, has assembled a phenomenal blend of readings and concerts: from Cintra Wilson to Salman Rushdie, from Mike Doughty to Hilary Hahn. “There's no doubt in my mind,” Lupert said, “that we would never be where we are without the series.”

Ultimately, the store brings together various role players, all of whom share an investment in fostering literary culture over profit margins: those who donate their books, CDs, DVDs, and records; the staff and volunteers; the advisory board; the writers who read for free; the musicians who take no cut of ticket sales; the customers, past, present, and future who help to keep the place alive; and the clients who benefit from the money you spend there.

What has developed organically out of the long-term and always-present process of these various parts coming together to help others is a bookstore that thrives not on silver-tongued marketing and blind consumption, not on elitism or naïve nostalgia, but on an active, engaged relationship with New York City.

Yet, is all of this enough to sustain a literary community?

“I really believe that Housing Works was and is at the forefront of how to integrate the community, New York City,” Lupert said, clearly and deliberately. “On a daily basis I'm blown away with how they've integrated themselves into a city this large.”

In the end, regardless of what people know or don’t know about the bookstore’s social vision, regardless of whether or not they care about the mission, people keep going back, their friends in tow, the bookstore’s reputation growing recommendation by recommendation.

(Cafe tables from Housing Works, dark cafe shot from d.wen's flickr stream and Housing Works van from Vidiot's flickr stream.)

Comments

[Michael jones]

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