MotherSister Brooklyn

Bookstores are my temples. From Mugwumps, a funky, early-80s-era shop in Little Rock, to Foyles in London (where, before its renovation and retrofitting, browsing the aisles meant risking burial by a tower of books, precariously crammed from any available surface to the ceiling), I enter and immediately feel more at peace and unable to leave with my hands empty. Which is why it’s deeply odd for me to live in a highly literate New York neighborhood without a local large general-interest bookstore.

Jessica Stockton Bagnulo may be set to finally change that. The keen mind behind The Written Nerd, one of the best blogs on books and bookselling you’ll read, Jessica has also just won the Brooklyn Public Library’s PowerUp! business plan competition. Local residents immediately began lobbying Jessica to open up shop here, so Fort Greene/Clinton Hill isn’t about to lose out to Windsor Terrace or Prospect Heights without a fight. Still, $15K is just the start of the funding that Jessica will need to pull it off, and there’s still the pesky matter of securing a suitable space at a reasonable price.

I have no doubt, though, that Jessica will realize her dream: Not only is her enthusiasm infectious, but she also has worked methodically for the better part of a decade to learn the ins and outs of the business. Find out why she’s bullish on independent bookselling and hear her ideas about the bookstore that could soon be on a Fort Greene/Clinton Hill corner after the jump.
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The Fort Greene Association Retail Survey results have been tallied by our man Jon Zeitlin, and the findings will be distributed soon via your friendly neighborhood media outlets such as The Brooklyn Paper. While the press release and report are coming together, however, I’ll tease you with a few tidbits:

• 58% of the respondents (there were ~400) said they were “somewhat likely” to satisfy their daily needs when shopping in Fort Greene; another 34% were either somewhat or very unlikely to find what they needed.
• No surprise that there was significantly greater satisfaction with existing restaurant options than retail/services options.
• The effect of the Internet on brick-and-mortar stores is overrated, at least for this neighborhood: Only 10% of respondents shop online when they can’t find what they need here, while 51% cruise over to a nearby neighborhood and another 32% handle their business in Manhattan instead.
• The top 10 most-wanted places across categories (retail, restaurants, and services) were: bookstore (overwhelmingly — something like 70% or so of survey respondents picked this), bakery with bread and desserts, seafood store, hardware store, natural foods store, gourmet grocery store, cheese store, 24-hour diner, stationery/card store, and florist. The most-wanted places were fairly consistent across incomes and ethnicities.
• Other desired stores included a bike shop, a food co-op, an Ethiopian restaurant, a knitting store, and a cooking supplies/housewares store. Um, and someone did request a Starbucks.
• The person who requested a Starbucks was a lone wolf, though: Respondents rejected “chains,” Starbucks, fast-food or take-out Chinese, “overpriced boutiques and markets,” porn shops (!), and dollar stores.
• At the Ingersoll and Whitman houses, respondents most wanted a supermarket, preferably either a Pathmark or Shop Rite (though Fairway, Costco, BJs, and Wal-Mart got 1 vote each as well.

As for my beloved bowling alley, it seems that mostly black respondents wanted one — it was number 12 of 20 when the data was cut by race. Someone pointed out that there is a bowling alley in the basement of Cadman Church on Lafayette and Clinton; wonder if it could be refurbished and find a new life?