NEW YORK — If you were around Manhattan in the 1990s, you hated Barnes & Noble the way you hated garbage strikes or Celine Dion. The chain seemed to expand on a weekly basis, and it got in the way — of the independent book stores it displaced, of a Jane Jacobs vision of the streetscape, of your belief that you were living in a place that was so much more idiosyncratic than wherever you came from.
When Amazon, even more gargantuan and impersonal, emerged to send Barnes & Noble toward its inevitable descent, you eventually found yourself nostalgic for what you had failed to appreciate.
In no place was the company’s diminished fortune felt as intensely as it was in the Bronx, where gratitude for what it provided far outweighed snobbishness. Five years ago when Barnes & Noble announced that it was closing the only branch it had opened there, residents and local civic leaders were angry and heartbroken and fought to save it.
At the time, there were 90 bookstores in Manhattan. But the Bronx essentially had just the one, and now it would disappear. Those who lived in the Bronx couldn’t help feeling that the gatekeepers of cultural commerce found them unworthy.
Noëlle Santos, who worked in human resources, was especially torn up. In 2014 she was on Facebook when she stumbled upon a petition to save Barnes & Noble. It pointed out how alarming it was that the Bronx was getting more and more cellphone stores and chain restaurants but would be left without a place to buy novels or training manuals or SAT preparation guides. Santos grew up in the Bronx, in Soundview, a rough neighborhood, and she stayed in the Bronx for college and graduate school. But she suddenly felt a radical need to change things.
“Up to that point I had measured my success by how far I could get away from the Bronx,’’ she told me recently. “I was disappointed in myself for thinking about leaving a community in no better condition than I had found it,’’ she said.
“I had never been inside an independent book store before I decided to open one.”
On Saturday, she was to open such a store, The Lit. Bar.
She was in her late 20s and working in an office in lower Manhattan when she called the American Booksellers Association on a fact-finding mission. She heard from the group about a course called “Owning a Bookstore.” She had to pool her vacation days and sick days to fly to Florida to take it. There, she learned how to calculate sales projections; how to negotiate a lease; how to think about layouts, floor plans and foot traffic.
She still had many questions, so when she came home she started volunteering at small bookstores around the city in exchange for mentorship. She also entered a statewide competition for entrepreneurs with promising business plans. Hundreds of others had entered it too, but Santos won.
It was the end of 2016, and the Barnes & Noble in the Bronx was finally closing; advocates who fought to protect it had managed to keep it open for two more years, but its time was up. Santos used her prize money to open a pop-up book shop at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. But she needed real money to open an actual store, so she started a crowdfunding campaign and called it, “Let’s Bring a Goddamn Bookstore to the Bronx.’’ It turned out that there was great enthusiasm for this venture; she quickly raised $170,000.
Her effort has culminated in the opening of what will stand as the only general-interest bookstore in the Bronx, a borough of 1.5 million people. It is in Mott Haven, which has a poverty rate twice the city’s average. As they did when Barnes & Noble was around, people who live in the Bronx will presumably travel long distances to visit.
It so happens that local bookstores are having a renaissance around the country. A decade ago, the American Booksellers Association had approximately 1,400 members in 1,650 locations. Last year it had 1,835 members operating in 2,470 locations. Despite the fact that walking around New York can increasingly mimic the experience of walking around the Mall of America, bookstores are opening now pretty frequently, as if to persuade the doubters to stay, to forget about moving to one of the Portlands or Philadelphia.
In November, Shakespeare & Co. returned to the Upper West Side after a two-decade absence. McNally Jackson Books is expanding to Downtown Brooklyn and the South Street Seaport. Earlier this year, the Center for Fiction opened near the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a membership library for old books, a bookstore, a cafe, reading rooms and writing rooms. On a recent visit on a weekday afternoon, I found the crowd to be both ample and diverse.
Santos wanted to produce something she couldn’t find in the part of the world she came from — an intellectual visibility. In that, the Bronx was not alone. It was facing extinction everywhere.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.