Housing Works Bookstore
Today, my mission to find the best bookstore in New York for me continues at Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo.
In just four days, my husband and I will fly to Cape Town to kick off a honeymoon so belated it’s basically just an elaborate vacation at this point. I’ll be in the air for 20 hours – each way! – so I need a lot of reading material.
With acquisition in mind, I went to one of my old haunts – Housing Works Bookstore on Crosby Street just south of Houston – during one of the store’s periodic 30% off days. Like the Frying Pan and Vanessa’s Dumplings, I associate Housing Works with a particular era in my life, specifically when I moved to Manhattan eight years ago for a fashion internship at Derek Lam. I was all the early 20s things – full of ideas, rich in free time, high on new friendships, and head over heels in love with New York. It was one of the happiest times in my life. It was also one of the most cash-poor. For nearly two years, I marketed $2000 handbags by day and hogged a table at Housing Works’ café by night, nursing drip coffee and reading Taschen tomes for hours before buying 50 cent paperbacks to take home.
Housing Works is a temple of 20-foot ceilings, spiral staircases, and charitable virtue. It’s a non-profit that supports the homeless and people living with HIV. It’s completely volunteer-run. And it’s a hub of this city’s book culture – regularly hosting readings, events, and The Moth. Housing Works might be the first place where I really understood that a bookstore can be so much more than a bookstore – it can be a place where people gather, where people linger all day, and yes, where people fight, Black Friday style, over a $2 used copy of The Grapes of Wrath (the lady in the yellow hat won).
During my visit, I employed a markedly less aggressive strategy, sidestepping the stampede of sale-seeking shoppers on the main floor to seek peace (and photo-taking vantage) on the balcony above. In the end, I walked out with hardcover copies of Tracy Daugherty’s The Last Love Song and Frank Bruni’s Born Round. Total cost? $14
The verdict? With beauty, bargains, and betterment in spades, this might objectively be the best bookstore in the city. Books Are Magic has some serious competition.
