New York’s Strand Bookstore Fights Back Over Landmark Status
12th October 2019
In its 92-year history, the Strand, a New York institution and one of the world’s largest independent bookstores, has endured everything from the Great Depression to the explosion of Amazon.
It is a cruel irony, then, that having survived against the odds, the latest potential threat to the third-generation family business comes from an organisation whose purpose is supposed to be to protect.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) announced in June that it had granted the Strand’s home – an 11-storey building between Manhattan’s Greenwich and East Villages – landmark status, despite vocal opposition from its owner who warned it would “destroy” the popular store.
‘Landmark status’ is a favorite proglodyte tool for confiscating somebody’s property without the compensation required by the 5th Amendment. It is quintessentially fascist.