New York City is the literary capital of the world, but many of its neighborhoods are still without a community bookstore.
As the big box book retailers shutter (Borders) or contract (Barnes and Noble), the health of community bookshops is more important than ever. They provide access to harder-to-find small press material and, perhaps more crucially, a meeting place for neighborhood residents and artists.
The Washington Heights neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, despite its population and geographic size, has long been without an independent bookstore that provides a venue for author readings and performance.
In the wake of the closure of New Jersey’s only public television station, lawmakers have put forth a plan to divide New Jersey into two parts and offer the sections to their respective neighbors, Pennsylvania and New York.
The move has been met with a mixed response. State agencies in both New York and Pennsylvania will scramble to revise vital statistics records for the nation’s most densely populated state, which will now show births, deaths and marriages to have taken place in their new states. While the project will create hundreds of long-term temporary jobs in both states, it will require tax hikes that will wipe out any savings New Jersey residents may have hoped to see as they join the tax rolls of their new home states. Residents of New York and Pennsylvania are also not happy to gain New Jersey’s financial troubles.
