http:/ / / digital/ collections/ text/.http:/ / / Reference/ Libraries/ Digital/.http:/ / prodigi.bl.uk/ treasures/ caxton/ search.asp.http:/ / / avaxhome_search?q=Search&commit=Go.She is currently working on her eleventh book, a biography of Ernest Hemingway. Blume is a New York City–based journalist and author. 31 West 57th Street Please check for updates. Rizzoli Bookstore’s last day is Friday, April 11. But many of us will long mourn the loss of its current home, and with it some of our own personal history. Rizzoli’s staffers say that they’re scouting new locations for the bookstore, and they will no doubt find a charming home elsewhere in the city. The soaring original Beaux Arts Penn Station was smashed to bits to make way for the train hub’s hulking, ugly, current incarnation Grand Central Station would not be standing today if not for the intervention of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who helped stave off a passel of hungry developers in the 1970s. But there is good progress, and there is thick-headed progress, and the probable demolition of the Rizzoli Bookstore townhouse is a reminder that New Yorkers have not always been so enlightened about preserving the city’s glorious past while setting the stage for its future. It’s a vital component of the nervous electricity that fuels the place, and always will be a cornerstone of the New York state of mind. New York City’s idea of itself has always been premised on some notion of progress. As one writer succinctly put it, “our world is shrinking.” This manhunt has coincided with the demise of other literary landmarks, such as Elaine’s restaurant on the Upper East Side-long the smoke-filled, every-night outpost of several generations of the city’s most ravenously ambitious and outrageous writers. Hallowed Greenwich Village bookstores such as Left Bank Books and the Biography Bookshop were relocated from their original homesteads thanks to skyrocketing rents SoHo’s McNally Jackson is seeking asylum in Brooklyn.
But these sorts of disappearances have been crescendoing in recent years. Scott Fitzgerald, our count of enchanted literary haunts has diminished by one.
With Rizzoli’s imminent departure, to paraphrase F. Writerly New York feels particularly under assault. And when I grew up and started writing books of my own, I held book launch parties there under that witty countess’s chandelier-and considered myself officially admitted to heaven. The delectables on offer there are always sublime: glossy, sleek books about fashion, photography, and design I met more interesting people through these books than I ever did at a cocktail party. Over the years, when I have felt like immersing myself in Capote-era New York City, I’d jaunt through Bergdorf Goodman, trot up the street for lunch at the Russian Tea Room, and then head to Rizzoli for dessert. A cake-icing dome crowns the bookstore’s two-story foyer the enormous cast iron chandelier above portends the grand time you are about to have inside. If many independent bookstores fall into the category of “jewel box,” Rizzoli is more of a jewel vault-one that would have belonged to a witty, ermine-clad countess of White Russian descent. If you love ideas and beauty and elegance, then you would likely love the famous Rizzoli Bookstore, housed in a glorious six-story townhouse on Manhattan’s 57th Street.
0 kommentar(er)
