Dashwood Books
A few days ago, I eavesdropped on a conversation between two girls on the subway.
“New York is good to live in until you’re 25,” the first girl said.
Her friend nodded sagely. “It’s the place to find yourself for sure,” she offered. “But then you have to get out before it grinds you down. It’s a young person’s city.”
I caught the eye of a fellow train passenger, who rolled her eyes and laughed under her breath. I laughed in turn – did the second girl know she was paraphrasing Joan Didion? – though in truth I’ve been as guilty as them both of psychoanalyzing this city. When I first lived here a decade ago, I copied New York platitudes into my diary – quotes by Mark Twain about making your mark here, quotes by Charles Bukowski about this being a city only for the lucky. But at this point, I’ve lived here for so long that New York no longer feels like a symbol of any one thing. I’ve been happy and sad here. I’ve been broke and comfortable here. I’ve had two bad break ups and gotten engaged here. I’ve had six apartments, three jobs, and one child here.
And yet, even as the city’s once-singular meaning morphs into something more for me, some places retain their specific magic and meaning. West Chelsea takes me back to sweltering summer nights sitting on strangers’ stoops, shielding my skirt from the drip of Mister Softee ice cream cones. Midtown makes me feel 18 again, seduced by even the city’s least charming parts during my first visit. And the financial district makes my stomach churn with the loneliness of long weeks apart from Emmett. The city is littered with these transporting places, stores and streets and whole neighborhoods like little time capsules.
A few weeks ago, I found myself smack dab in one of those nostalgia zones – Bond Street between Broadway and the Bowery. This street has so much going for it – cast iron and café tables, colorful awnings and fire escapes, boutiques and restaurants and girls in perilously tall heels deftly navigating cobblestone streets. Bond Street evokes the blessedly brief time in my life when I used to do exactly the sort of embarrassing stuff those subway girls did – meditating on the meaning of New York while sitting smack dab in the middle of it.
This time, I was there for work, to see a client space at Showfields, the self-styled Most Interesting Store in the World (spoiler: it isn’t). So afterwards, I stopped by a much more interesting store, Dashwood Books. Dashwood is a diminutive subterranean bookstore, the only one in New York devoted to rare and out-of-print photography tomes. It’s owned by David Strettell, a man who once worked as an assistant to Mario Testino. I know almost nothing about photography books but I delighted in the ones here – one by Paige Powell that collects photographs of artists eating, another by Marie Tomanova called Young Americans that made me yearn for an urban adolescence I never had. I bought a collection of photographs by John Lehr called The Island Position, who documents fading retail spaces made obsolete by e-commerce. It’s a fascinating collection of the details of struggling stores that move me – dusty shop windows with warped cardboard and dead plants, ‘OPEN’ signs scrawled by hand, ink on packages so faded by the sun that only blue survives.
The funny thing about Dashwood is that it’s been open for 14 years – it was there all those times I wandered Bond Street with my heart on my sleeve. I just never noticed it until now. Now, I’m so glad I did.
