Save Rizzoli Bookstore Petition Campaign Launched

Shelf Awareness

A Save Rizzoli petition campaign has been launched, requesting that the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission designate 31 West 57th street as an individual and interior landmark. "The Rizzoli Bookstore building is an icon of New York City architecture and one of the most beautiful commercial spaces in America," the petition states. "It is an impressive example of adaptive reuse of a former piano showroom into a retail space and one of the few remaining examples of architecturally significant bookstores in an era where bookstores are increasingly threatened."

The effort comes after last week's reports that owners of the building that houses Rizzoli Bookstore plan to demolish the six-story, 109-year-old structure--as well as two small, adjoining buildings--to potentially make way for a luxury high-rise. Rizzoli responded to the news by insisting that it remains open for business at its current location while it seeks new space.

Jon Michaud wrote a tribute to Rizzoli Bookstore, his employer from 1991 to 1994, on the New Yorker's Page-Turner blog last week, concluding: "Rizzoli's thirty-year run at its Fifty-seventh Street location is a more-than-respectable showing in the convulsive annals of midtown retail. If nothing else, its potential disappearance should remind us to value the many magnificent bookstores that the city still boasts: Three Lives, Book Court, McNally Jackson, Word, Word Up, and Book Culture, to name a representative handful. The migration of bookselling to Brooklyn, uptown and Jersey City follows the flow of the city's literary life. Only the ghosts of bookstores past remain in midtown."