A Sense of Doubt blog post #1454 - Closing of St. Marks Comics

St. Marks Comics is closing after 36 years

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1454 - Closing of St. Marks Comics

This is a quickie, a share, a reprint, because I was in Grading Hell (well, I still am) and I am behind.

After Forbidden Planet, St. Marks Comics was the second comic store I found in Manhattan. I hope they get a great price for the prime real estate. It was a cool little nook with crannies.

Sadness.

I miss New York.

FROM -

https://www.comicsbeat.com/st-marks-comics-is-closing-after-36-years/

A Trip to St. Marks Comics

Yesterday's shocking announcement of the closing of St. Marks Comics set off a wave of nostalgia among thousands of people - myself included. I guess the '90s really died that day.

I think of St. Marks as a '90s thing because from 1994 to 1998, I lived a block or so away on 9th Street.  It was a fun time for Astor Place and the East Village and I was young enough to enjoy some of it - or at least to buy some of the fancy shoes that 8th Street used to specialize in. (For non-New Yorkers, St. Marks is the name for 8th Street east of Astor Place at Broadway.)  I brought most of my vinyl clothing at Joyce Leslie at University and not at Trash and Vaudeville, the famed punk/clubwear store on St. Marks, but I definitely still have a trinket or two from there tucked away in my jewelry archives.

Back then, St. Marks Comics was a hang out for my comics crowd, usually after dinner at Around the Clock or some Indian place on 6th Street. In the pre-Internet days, we got our information and inspiration from walking around and going to book and record and video stores. Looking at the magazine covers at Tower Video on 4th or the Astor Place Barnes and Noble was a great way to see what was hot and up and coming, and Tower Records was where you picked up your new KMFDM singles or Radiohead CDs.

And, of course, a trip to St. Marks Comics (or just St. Marks for short) was where to see the comics covers and check our who had a new book, or once in a while get a toy or "zine" as the underground-ish niche culture publications were known.

Anyway, I'm doing the old fart reminiscing thing, but it's okay because someday you will do it too! You'll be crying someday when Baracde closes.  It's life. When I lived in LA, I used to remark that because I lived near a library, a good bookstore. and Tower Records on Sunset, I had the "total" of human culture all within a few blocks. What I didn't know is that I would soon enough be holding it all in the palm of my hand.

Today, January 30th, 2019, I returned to my old haunts for a lovely lunch of Vietnamese food with Whitney Matheson, my old blogging colleague, and in the late Aughts/early Teens a member of a small group of women writers about comics that used to gather occasionally. Other members included Kai Ming Cha, Evie Nagy, and Nisha Gopalan. I miss them and those days as well! It was great to see Whitney and catch up with her work and hear about her school-age daughter. 

Afterward, I went to a café to work and it began to snow. Nice big flakes! A brisk arctic wind picked up. My plan was to visit St. Marks Comics (Owner Mitch Cutler and I had emailed and he'd said I should just stop by) and the filigree of rapidly melting snow provided a nice garnish to streets that were now simply drab without the energy and style of ye olden days. 

I am well aware that New York is undergoing a retail apocalypse, but I seldom go to the East Village these days, and I was still surprised and saddened to see endless empty storefronts on block after block on the walk over.

I'm told there are 17 empty stores on the St Marks St. block between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. That is a lot. What remains is mostly Japanese restaurants, a single bar from the punk days (Bull McCabes) and a lot of vape shops. Even the gaudy places where you'd buy trendy cheap sunglasses in the summer and hats in the winter were mostly scrubbed away.

St. Marks Comics was busy and Mitch had the air of someone with a lot on his mind. "It's been the strangest 24 hours of my life," he told me. The thousands of messages and memories must have been overwhelming. We retreated to the back of the store to chat a bit, and I asked him what had led to the closure. He repeated what he'd told other places: "The retail environment has a lot of challenges and it's enough."

While many comics shops are closing, it is fair to say that St. Marks Comics has a lot of unique issues. The general decline of the shopping district itself and New York's brutal retail environment are as much concerns as the comics industry issues we talk about here. 

Mitch didn't want to go into any specifics about all that, as is his right, but he said I could quote him on one thing. "I've never once said that comics are dying," he told me when I asked if that oft-repeated narrative had any relevance to his story. "That doesn't mean there aren't issues, but I don't believe that for a minute."

"We're going to have a wake, not a funeral," he said, saying that the store would continue on for the next month with sales and cleaning of long-lost vaults of stuff. And indeed our conversation was often interrupted by people asking prices or wanting to deal. 

I'll tell you one thing if you are local... GET OVER TO ST. MARKS COMICS ASAP! They are an Aladdin's cave of everything from deluxe boxed sets (many long out of print) to mini-comics, toys, collectibles...for now all 30% off. 

As I left I took the photo on the right you see above. The photo on the left is from a photo shoot I did for a zine piece I did when I first moved to NYC. It was about how gross it was compared to living in LA. Undoubtedly the most miserable self-indulgent thing I'd ever written and the editor made me rewrite it so it wasn't so whiny. I knew I had the old photo and when I heard of the closing I managed to find it. I'm not standing in front of St. Marks Comics but a few steps away in front of what's now Yakitori Taisho. I looked around for the same grillwork on the stairs in the old photo and found the spot. Instead of a phone kiosk there's now an ATM there. (Back in the day you did not dare take money from an ATM in the E.Vill or LES for fear of getting mugged right away.)

Past the ATM was a row of shuttered stores. On 3rd Avenue what had once been the famous (and delicious) St Marks Pizza and then a string of falafel places is closed. The Continental, a dive bar rock club, is closed. St Marks Books is long gone. Even McDonald's is gone. It's pretty clear this whole block is going to be razed for a high rise building soon. 

On the way to the subway, (next to where I used to live) I passed the Cooper Union, where both Lincoln and Obama spoke and my grandfather went to college on an art scholarship,  and then the Cube at Astor Place. I decided to duck into the K-Mart where U2 had once played to kick off their ill-fated Pop Mart Tour. It had never been a cheerful place but it was now indescribably dismal and the whole third floor had been turned into something else, all the departments squeezed into two floors. 

The retail apocalypse had truly arrived. 

 -- Heidi MacDonald

TOP: The 25-year challenge.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1902.13 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1320 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.