NEW YORK
Sorry, We’re Closed
When good businesses die
For the first time in a long time, I bought a magazine at the check-out counter. It’s been a year of dependency on online tools and a virtual life that I normally resist but that we have all been forced into thanks to the pandemic. Lately, I have been relishing as many brick-and-mortar moments as I can get, anything to balance a life now led on Zoom. The cover story of the latest issue of New York Magazine features illustrations of the storefronts of 38 New York businesses that are now closed, permanently. The black-and-white sketches were what caught my eye — a rest for my rods and cones in the Pantone chip book that is my local Whole Foods.
Most Sundays don’t find me on the couch reading a magazine, but thankfully today did. And I soon discovered that the cover was only the prelude to a longer list of 500 city businesses that have shuttered for good, many just blocks or miles away. Some were classics like the Copacabana, opened in 1940, where my grandparents used to dance when they were dating. Others were opened for a later generation, like BBar in Noho, established in 1993, where I used to go as part of my coming-out club crawl, back when Tuesday night was as hot as Saturday night in my early 20s. The list was a comprehensive obituary of everything from Odessa in the East Village to the Staten…
