A friend in Staten Island sent me the link to a story in something called Jeremiah's Vanishing New York aka The Book of Lamentations: A Bitterly Nostalgic Look at a City in the Process of Going Extinct.
It was on the closing of the Complete Traveler Bookshop on Madison Avenue. I used to stop in there in the late 70s when I was fishing for visas at the nearby Polish consulate. And I visited on my last trip to New York a few years ago, finding the continents, as always, divided into sections. It seemed exactly the sort of bookstore one should find in the self-proclaimed "greatest city in the world."
Now high rents are driving it out of business, like numerous bookstores before it, as New York transmogrifies from a city of riches to a city for the rich.
