Maplewood shop, The Book House, will lose about half its space on the first floor due to the building’s owner (Red Brick Management) deciding to open up the east side of the first floor to another tenant.
The book store uses the front of the east side for its children’s book section. The space behind that is used for storage.
The store is having a clearance sale as a result.
HUGE clearance sale at the Book House, starting this weekend – ALL books discounted! https://t.co/9lsK63CNmV #booksale @EnjoyMaplewood pic.twitter.com/xxQ5GrsX9W
— Book House STL (@BookHouseSTL) January 13, 2018
Red Brick Management is definitely living up to their terrible reputation with this action. The space was vacant for twenty years, and then Book House comes in, raises huge funds to renovate and make the space usable, and now Red Brick wants to capitalize on someone else’s work and investment. From what I’ve heard, they do this all over town. I wish there was a way to hold landlords like this accountable, but the law seems to protect these kind of opportunists.
It’s unfortunate that the landlord wouldn’t improve that side of the space enough to be able to use it. It has no back egress so it could never be utilized for anything more than storage and the costs to put one in are prohibitively expensive for a small business.
I hate to see that section of the shop go away, especially the displays in that window. But in the landlord’s defense, the space behind that part of the shop is significant, and it represents a huge amount of wasted space. You could easily fit a restaurant or small music venue in that space. The book shop is using about 10% of the available space on that side for retail space. Behind that wall of children’s books is basically a dusty room filled with book boxes and who knows what else. Book House has had plenty of time to do something with that space. It’s time to put it to use.
Sorry to see them lose space but I guess the bookstore should have had a better lease.
That’s a pretty stupid decision. That bookstore is just right the way it is!
This is so disappointing. We love sitting in the children’s book area to read with our toddler before making a purchase. I hope this greedy landlord realizes this will hurt local kids.
Someone should just buy up some of the parking lot of the shop and save and make that into a duplicate of the other side of Manchester
Typical heartless Rothschild