The Last Days Of The Rittenhouse Barnes & Noble

BY JOEY SWEENEY | You hated them in You’ve Got Mail, but over time, somehow, Barnes & Noble became lovable. Demanding of it, even. As big box retail in America has gotten either more stupid or more dead, Barnes & Noble presently exists as one of the comfort foods of brands. No matter where you are in the country, the very existence of a B&N store carries with it the pang of an only maybe slightly simpler time — not necessarily pre-Internet, but certainly pre- bad Internet. To think, it was once the Pepsi to Borders Books & Music’s Coke. 

Barnes & Noble has been suffering through these years, as you might imagine, and it’s been fascinating and slightly heartbreaking to watch, whether we’re talking about the business press, or the actual experience of visiting one of their stores. Especially the one in Philly.

Because Philly, as always, is a special case. 

The 18th & Walnut store is one of the ever fewer places you can go in this city without technically having to buy anything. This no doubt displeases the corporation, but much in the same way that Philadelphia is psychologically divorced from Pennsylvania, this Barnes & Noble psychologically divorced itself from its parent corporation long ago. 

Over the weekend, it was revealed that this Barnes & Noble will be relocating to 17th and Chestnut, in an article that was remarkably devoid of much else in the way of information, other than that presumed mayoral candidate Allan Domb had a hand in it. This is obscuring the forest for one very uninteresting tree, because the forest is all the ways that this place has become something entirely unto itself over the years. 

We feel it’s important to document it. 

As the chain tries valiantly, low-key desperately, to rescue itself across all of its stores, the fact of the matter is that the Philly store, situated just across from Rittenhouse Square, has been a kind of rescue mission unto itself for a long time now. And in the last decade especially, as the wheels have been coming off both the country and the city, this Barnes & Noble has functioned as a kind of Port Authority, serving as a waystation for late-stage American capitalism’s tired, poor and hungry. 

The bathroom, one of the only public ones in the area, has a sharps container. The container, when you see it, presents as deeply sad and very interesting at once. To see it in a corporate environment is to see, finally, an idea about harm reduction in action in a city that has a hard time getting its head around such an idea; that it’s Barnes & Noble that sees this, and acts on it, is something else. 

Meanwhile, the cafe is a base for teens with nowhere else to go, and adults, too, of varying housing status. This store (and probably some others, in places that are just bleak in different ways) has become what the mall was in the 80s; there’s something dear about the groups of teens milling around looking at manga. This all has value as unprogrammed time for kids is harder and harder to come by, and spaces in which to have that time even more so. 

But that’s not all. This Barnes & Noble might just contain the whole of human experience. We once happened upon someone masturbating in the stacks. (This was in literary fiction, and you can write your own joke about that.) But then, counter-intuitively, it’s also a crucial location for parents in the city, as it’s one of the (again) few places in town that have a large selection of children’s books, and space for kids to check them out. 

Over the last few years, the winnowing of store comforts has been notable: They took the chairs away. The up escalators haven’t worked in more than a year. Every time you walk in the place, it feels like they declared bankruptcy earlier that day. There are a dozen registers, but most often there’s only one open, and God help the poor kid who’s on it.

As an actual bookstore, its function is… perfunctory. Over the years, what you can expect the store to carry has changed in tandem with B&N’s corporate whims — the tchotchke-rich store of, say, 2015, which featured every manner of puzzles, stationary, toys, records, and so on has given way to today’s version, which has cleared a lot of that to feature mainly (oh right!) books, though not always the one you want, if what you want is not on the NYT Bestseller List. (Likewise, what was once a bounty of literary magazines has been pruned, too, but it feels absurd to even mention it in light of the rest of all this.)

But here’s the thing: Even that perfunctory level of functioning is now very, very rare in this wing of the retail space right now. It may not sound like I’m describing a beloved place when I talk about this sad, wan Barnes & Noble store, but somehow, even given all of the above, it is. My household would be lost without it, and I know I’m not alone in this. 

Even so, the profound melancholy of this space (which sometimes also carries profoundly melancholy smells, part college dorm, part subway station) is a lens through which to view what the city life part of city life is like in Philadelphia right now. What city services does this Barnes & Noble low-key stand in for (probably lots) and how shameful is it that city has ceded these to a chain store in lieu of taking care of people in the shadow of the city’s most vital public square? And what will Rittenhouse Square be like once this modest, ad hoc semi-facility is gone from its immediate footprint?

In and of itself, the Rittenhouse B&N is not inherently lovable. But in experiencing the lack of spaces that do what this store somehow does, the news that it’s moving to a different locale (that presumably may not carry the specific burdens of this specific store) carries with it a surprise. It’s something maybe even more important than love: God help it, this space is necessary.