Why Are There So Many Shuttered Storefronts in the West Village?

TIM WU

At the end of this month, the House of Cards & Curiosities, on Eighth Avenue, just south of Jane Street, in the West Village, will close its doors after more than twenty years in business. It was, admittedly, not a store whose economic logic was readily apparent. Along with artistic greeting cards, it sold things like small animal skeletons, stuffed piranhas (which were hanging from the ceiling), and tiny ceramic skulls. Nonetheless, it did good business for many years, or so its owner, James Waits, told me. Its closing leaves four shuttered storefronts on just one block. With their papered-up windows and fading paint, the failed businesses are a depressing sight in an otherwise vibrant neighborhood. Each represents a broken dream of one kind or another.

The fate of the House of Cards & Curiosities is just one example of something odd that’s happening in some of New York’s richest and best-known neighborhoods—a surge in closings and shuttered shops. Consider, in particular, the West Village, the place that Jane Jacobs once described as a model for a healthy neighborhood, in her classic book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” The average per-capita income there is now more than a hundred and ten thousand dollars per year, and it retains its jazz clubs and fancy restaurants. It is both rich and vibrant, yet also now blighted with shuttered stores in various states of decay.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-are-there-so-many-shuttered-storefronts-in-the-west-village