The Strand survived through my grandfather and my dad's very hard work and their passion for this.
And then the city comes, just with one vote, and takes a piece of it.
They just want to put a bureaucratic noose me.
We're just asking to be left alone.
The Strand is New York City's last great book store.
A four story literary emporium, crammed with 18 miles of merchandise,
stuffed into towering bookcases, arranged along narrow passageways.
Nancy Bass Wyden, who owns both The Strand and the building it inhabits
is fighting to prevent the city from designating it a historic landmark.
She says that the effort to preserve the building could destroy her business.
Once the structure is land-marked, the owner needs to get permission from the city
before renovating the interior or altering the facade.
It would be very difficult to be commercially nimble if we're land-marked.
We'd have to get approvals through a whole committee and bureaucracy
that do not know how to run a book store.
And that does not allow me the flexibility to change with the changing retail book environment
and to serve our customers.
The strand started out as just one destination along the world famous Book Seller's Row.
A commercial district comprised of about 40 secondhand dealers.
When Wyden's immigrant grandfather opened his book stall on 8th Street in 1927
nobody could have predicted that one day it would be the district's sole survivor.
Wyden's sense of outrage that the city wants to compromise her property rights
derives in part from her father and grandfather's decades of struggle to keep the business alive.
The Depression hit, so my grandfather just reverted to living on a cot
in the basement of the book store.
My grandfather and my dad both worked most of their life 6 days a week, hardly took vacations,
and to his credit my dad saved up all of his money to buy the building.
If it's not land-marked, there is the chance that you can be like
'Screw it, I'm, you know what I realize that I wanna go spend the rest of my life on the beach.
I'm shutting down the business, I'm selling the property, and it's gonna get renovated
and that's my right.'
I believe it is my right, I mean after three generations of sweat and toil
I mean we should have our say on what we're going to do.
So how is it that Wyden's freedom to do what she wants with her book store
can be curtailed by eleven un-elected individuals?
Signed into law in 1965, the Landmarks Act was challenged as unconstitutional
13 years later by the owner of Grand Central Terminal.
Which sued the city for preventing it from building a skyscraper on top of the train station.
The Supreme Court upheld the law,
setting a precedent that in the dissenting opinion of Justice William Rehnquist
undermined constitutional protections.
As Rehnquist wrote,
the city had in a literal sense taken substantial property rights from the company
without offering just compensation as required by the Fifth Amendment.
Since that ruling, the number of land mark properties in New York has more than doubled
to about 36 thousand, encompassing more than a quarter of all the buildings in Manhattan.
When the owners of those properties objected, their stories rarely garnered attention.
One of the differences is that you're The Strand, and you matter, so people pay attention.
Do you feel like this type of story is playing out on different levels
for property owners or business owners who might not be as famous as you
or in places as kind of media centric.
Yes, I've been able to get more attention because of that and more public outcry
and I think that there are other business owners like me
that end up just kind of getting trapped in this situation without much of a voice.
In her opposition to land marking The Strand:
We're just asking to be left alone.
Wyden is unknowingly echoing the line of retired public school librarian Ella Suydam,
owner of a Brooklyn farmhouse that had been in her family since 1720.
'Who the hell are you to tell me what I can do with my house?'
Suydam told the Landmarks Commission in 1980,
Intimidating it's members into backing off.
The Commission waited until Suydam was dead nine years later, to landmark her property.
Most building owners are less successful in their dealings with the Landmarks Commission.
Take this property in Manhattan's meat packing district,
one of the handful of buildings purchased in the 1940s by Louis Meilman,
a Russian born butcher.
By 2003, his son and grandsons were planning to cash in by building a much taller building on the site.
Enter the Landmarks Commission.
If the building's become part of a landmark district
this will essentially eliminate new construction
and eliminate the ability for our family to utilize the undeveloped air rights.
The Meilmans lost their fight later that year.
All done with your shopping list, or is this just for you?
Those are just for me!
Cool, I love it!
Wyden is committed to preserving her family's legacy.
Happy holidays, thanks for coming here.
She just objects to the loss of control over her property.
You add another component of government, you add bureaucracy, you add committees,
you add people having opinions about what we should do inside the store
as well as outside the store.
Our family's been a great steward, two years ago there was a massive sewer fire
and we restored the windows to the prior look
and we restored the granite pillars to the way it originally had been.
I want to continue The Strand forever, that's my legacy and my goal in life.
But can a bricks and mortar book store really survive forever?
In 1969, at a time when The Strand was thriving,
Wyden's father, Fred Bass,
told a New York Times reporter that obsolescence would come eventually
'Some day' he said 'readers will have a telephone with a screen and you'll be able to dial a book.'
'Readers will have instant contact with thousands of books.
Then I go into the antiques business.'
You know, he wasn't wrong.
Can you imagine a time when The Strand will come and go,
and you'll be selling antiques or you'll be selling yoga pads instead.
I hope not, I'd like to have a shot at a fourth generation of my kids running the store and continuing.
New York City needs unusual places like The Strand, with 91 years of history
and for the city to get out of it's way so it can continue.
Do you think you're going to win your fight?
I've been told that nobody wins with Landmarks,
but I want to fight them because it's just so wrong and so unjust and so unfair
and we can't let them keep running over everybody in their way.
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