A lifelong favorite, even if only occasionally visited, but I too am sad to see it go.
However, even without COVID or any of the myriad other challenges to the city's "soul,"--which seems always under assault-- the fact is beloved landmark businesses in every sector have closed often and abruptly for decades. To some minds, I suppose, simply part of the city's survival of the fittest nature.
My father--a fan of the great department stores in their golden era--mourned the loss of Tripler and De Pinna, and equally the closing of Rumplemeyers as a reliable source of hot chocolate apres iceskating in Central Park. I miss Rizzoli's all night bookshop housed in a palace at 712 Fifth Avenue (before the rise of Amazon), the tiny dining room reserved for smokers at Cafe des Artistes, and the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel. And I have a friend who's just published quite a good book about the heyday of the sprawling Chelsea Antiques market (before the advent of Ebay).
As for the radioactive subject of city politics--of which I shall steer well clear, except to note that it was Michael Bloomberg who made smoking public enemy number one in New York--relentlessly raising retail taxes on cigarettes to triple their price overnight, and then taking dead aim at making smoking unlawful in bars, restaurants, parks, offices, and shops--even those that sold tobacco products. And for Greenwich Village, NYU flush with cash went on a wild buying spree to buy every available building and property parcel. And before NYU, it was Robert Moses in a David and Goliath fight with Jane Jacobs. Ironically, maybe the best thing that ever happened to the west village was the collapse of a large section of the West Side Highway--which resulted in an uninterrupted ribbon of park now extending from the Battery north to the tip of Manhattan.
New York, in my experience, adapts and survives. And a creative community of some kind finds new neighborhoods to colonize, revive, and transform (in ways that can be distinguished from "gentrification"--even if this often comes later).
At the beginning of the aughts, it was the East River waterfront of Brooklyn--Williamsburg and DUMBO. Later Bed-Stuy and Bushwick, and the jury's still out (as the jury always is, except in retrospect) about what next hot cool with-it zone will emerge or be another also ran. The South Bronx? Lord knows, Long Island City and Washington Heights have been earnestly trying the past decade.
As for tobacconists, even if only now a franchise, I was delighted when Davidoff opened a cosy Williamsburg location next to Peter Luger's steakhouse a couple of years ago. And no, they didn't get a shipment of Esoterica this weekend. But they did answer cheerfully their phone, and sounded very much open for business.
