Shakespeare & Co. to Close Upper East Side Bookstore

Shakespeare & Co. is shuttering its Upper East Side location on Lexington Avenue next month, in another blow to local independent bookstore devotees. The store opened its doors across from Hunter College more than 20 years ago, and has been a staple among students and neighborhood residents ever since.

A spokesperson for the chain simply told Our Town that “the lease” for the store had expired, and that they had no plans to renew it. One of Shakespeare & Co.’s two Upper West Side stores, located on Broadway and West 105th Street, is also shuttering in the coming weeks due to financial difficulties. It’s been open a mere year.

These two store closures will leave one remaining Shakespeare & Co. outlet, at 2020 Broadway, at 69th Street on the Upper West Side, more than 30 blocks south of the soon-to-close West Side store.

Our Town visited the premises of the Lexington Avenue store on March 5, revealing the usual stream of customer traffic. However, unlike the West 105th store, there was no prominent “Store Closing” sign plastered on the front. Instead, a couple of large “Storewide SALE” signs provided the largest hint of impending demise. Smaller signs notified the public of a 25 percent sale on supplies, and a 15 percent sale on books.

Shoppers, many of whom had seemingly not heard the news of the store’s closure, were uniformly disappointed. Two of them, Joy and Vansh, were quite familiar with the store. Joy stopped in regularly, she told Our Town, and was “absolutely devastated.” Vansh, who has studied at Hunter and frequented the store in the past, said it was sad that the store would become a mere “memory” for him.

Paul, who was in town from New Orleans, had never been to the store before. However, he knew enough about the untimely demise of bookstores to bemoan another one lost, calling it “a terrible thing.” He elaborated that his independent hometown haunt, Maple Street Bookstore, closed in 2017. It was the “loss of my childhood,” Paul said, and a “severing of history.”

Shakespeare & Co. first put down roots in NYC back in 1983, opening its first store on Broadway and West 81st Street. That location survived until 1996, by which time the store had woven its way into the cultural zeitgeist by being featured in the late ‘80s rom-com classic When Harry Met Sally; the scene where Billy Crystal’s Harry reconnects with Meg Ryan’s Sally was filmed in the original store.

The company hopped over to the Upper East Side a few years later, when it opened its Lexington Avenue store. The company opened its West 69th Street store in 2018, while the ill-fated West 105th Street venture opened in March of last year.

The literati may be familiar with the Parisian iterations of Shakespeare & Company (which bear no relation to the NYC chain). The original, founded by American expat Sylvia Beach on the city’s Left Bank in 1919, was forced to close during the Nazi occupation of France. It was a famed hangout for authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. The earliest edition of Joyce’s Ulysses was published there, in 1922.

A revival of that store reopened under the auspices of George Whitman, on the Left Bank, in 1949. It’s still there today.