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The Booking of New Haven
The Yale Co-op lost its Broadway lease to Barnes & Noble last spring, but the venerable store is still in business, adding to the rich mix of New Haven’s publishing purveyors.
December 1997
by Patrick Dilger
Patrick Dilger’s article on the completion of the University’s $1.7-billion fundraising campaign appeared in the October 1997 issue.
For generations of Yale alumni like Bob O’Connor ’48, a return to New Haven has always meant a ritual visit to several non-academic shrines. The route led first to the racks of sports jackets at J. Press, then to the cordovan department at Barrie’s, perhaps to a cup of coffee at the Doodle, and—before cutting back to York Street for lunch at Mory’s—a leisurely browse through the aisles of books and Yale memorabilia at the Co-op on Broadway.
“You didn’t really have to think about where you were going,” says O'Connor, who visits the campus about a dozen times a year from his home in Bronxville, N.Y. “They were Yale institutions, like Woolsey Hall and Commons. You knew they were always going to be there.”
Nothing is forever. As of this fall, the 113-year-old Yale Co-op is no longer on Broadway; the site is now occupied by an academic superstore owned and operated by Barnes & Noble. To visit the Co-op, O’Connor and other alumni must readjust their compasses and head to the other side of Old Campus, to the store’s new home at 924 Chapel Street, on the edge of the New Haven Green. “It feels strange,” O’Connor says of the move. “Now I feel I have to go out of my way to say hello to an old friend.”
But in business, there is little room for sentimentality. And when the University decided to break with tradition and switch to Barnes & Noble as its new tenant at 65–77 Broadway, it did so, according to senior Yale officials, with the future interests of Yale and the surrounding neighborhood in mind. After a six-month selection process that involved representatives of the Provost’s Office, the Secretary’s Office, and faculty and alumni experts on real estate, the University decided last January, in the words of Secretary Linda Koch Lorimer, “that the Yale community’s needs are best served long-term by Barnes & Noble. They bring us experience as a successful operator of highly respected academic bookstores. And we were impressed by their commitment to working with major universities in the years ahead. We were also impressed by their eagerness to work closely with the Yale and New Haven communities.”
Although the Co-op had had hints of its fate for several months as Yale delayed renewing its lease, the final decision was nonetheless hard for loyalists to accept. “For years one of the cries of the University has been the need for a great academic bookstore,” says Co-op President Harry Berkowitz. “They already had a great academic bookstore.” That claim will be put to the test in the coming months as Barnes & Noble, which had been operating out of temporary space in the adjoining annex since the beginning of the school year, makes its bid for the attention of New Haven’s academic customers.
The Co-op is not alone in taking the measure of the new arrival on Broadway. For generations, New Haven has sustained a varied mix of booksellers, ranging from Bookhaven, Elm City Books, and C.A. Stonehill on York Street, to the Atticus Bookstore and Cafe in the British Art Center, the Foundry Bookstore on Whitney Avenue, and numerous independent purveyors like R. W. Smith, who specializes in hard-to-find editions of books on art and design. As independent bookstores around the country continue to close at an alarming rate (between 50 and 60 in 1996 alone, according to the American Booksellers Association), the survivors in New Haven have reason to be concerned about the impact Barnes & Noble may have on their fragile franchises.
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“We’re more than just a bookstore.”
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Yale officials have taken pains to point out that the new operator of what is formally known as “The Yale Bookstore” on Broadway is actually not the consumer-books giant that has earned a Wal-Mart-like reputation for gobbling up smaller competitors, but part of a privately held subsidiary, Barnes & Noble College Bookstores, Inc. But the subsidiary certainly benefits from its parent’s clout: College Bookstores, Inc. is the country’s leading purveyor of academic books, serving about 230 institutions of higher education. The company, which has signed a 15-year lease with Yale, already manages the book divisions of the Harvard Coop and the MIT Coop, and is collaborating on an academic superstore with the University of Pennsylvania. The company also manages the college bookstores for Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Columbia, and the University of Michigan.
Some proprietors of New Haven’s smaller outlets remain circumspect about the prospects of still-hotter competition. “If it helps to bring more people into the area, then I think it will be a good thing and we’ll benefit,” says Henry Schwab, owner of Bookhaven, which has served Yale students and faculty for 20 years. “But time will tell.”
Others, like Henry Berliner, owner of the Foundry Bookstore at 33 Whitney Avenue, are more outspoken, and remain firm in the belief that the personal attention they offer their predominantly local clientele cannot be matched by large retail stores. “The day I have to worry about competing with Barnes & Noble is the day I should get out of the book business,” says Berliner.
By late September, as the sound of jackhammers resounded through 65–77 Broadway, few vestiges of the old Yale Co-op remained. What was emerging in its place—at a cost of more than $1.5 million—was a 65,000-square-foot retail space that, according to Gary Spearow, general manager of The Yale Bookstore, will “serve as a prototype for the future. We’re more than just a bookstore. Our goal is to be a benchmark for the industry in terms of total collegiate services.”
Barnes & Noble’s commitment to its Yale incarnation is impressive. The new store provides a 50-percent increase in the number of trade books available for sale—to roughly 200,000 titles—while offering a range of discounts to purchasers. Scholarly and university press holdings have also been expanded, along with foreign books and monographs. The number of periodical titles has doubled, and designer labels like Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein have replaced the Co-op’s previously staid clothing lines. The main part of the store, with its dark wood paneling, traditional furnishings, and grand piano in the lobby, is intended to give the building a studious, academic feel. “We want a historical look that exudes Yale,” says John Letterman, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1989 while working in the Co-op’s book department and is now the new store’s assistant general manager for scholarly, academic, and trade books.
But the complex goes beyond traditional fare. The former Co-op East has been linked to the main store by a covered walkway to create what is called “Yale Marketplace,” offering fresh produce, a juice bar, health and beauty aids, and other everyday essentials for college and dormitory life. The wing also includes an upscale gift shop that stocks Yale insignia items in bronze, porcelain, and brass. Shoppers can pause during their exertions at a 75-seat “Yale Café” in the west wing.
A major factor that tipped Yale’s decision in favor of Barnes & Noble was the company’s willingness to stay open at night. The Co-op would only make an evening-hours commitment on a four-month trial, which Yale officials didn’t think was long enough to build a base of nighttime activity in the area. Barnes & Noble agreed to keep the new store open six nights a week for a minimum of two years. It is now open until 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and till 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with Sunday hours from noon until six.
Although the additional amenities being offered by the new store may seem wide of the literary mandate, they are an integral part of the University’s strategy for the neighborhood as a whole. “We hope that this will make the area more vibrant and lively and contribute to safety in that neighborhood and the economy of the city,” says Linda Lorimer. If her vision becomes reality, Broadway could become a strong bridge to the nearby Park-Howe-Dwight district, which is home to hundreds of members of the Yale community and has become a focus of the University’s efforts to improve its immediate surroundings.
Lorimer hopes that The Yale Bookstore will serve as a catalyst as well as an anchor. “We hope to attract two or three national retailers whose businesses would be very attractive to the Yale community and who could serve as a magnet for retaining other strong local tenants and recruiting new ones,” she says. Yale, which owns 97,000 square feet of retail space in the Broadway district, is pursuing discussions with other prominent retailers, including Eddie Bauer and Urban Outfitters.
Yale officials are sensitive to charges from local merchants that the goal is a sanitized destination for suburbanites. “I should state clearly that we are not endeavoring to replicate a ‘strip’ zone comprised solely of national tenants on Broadway,” Lorimer says, noting that the first beneficiaries of Yale’s redevelopment efforts on Broadway were new locations for Ashley’s Ice Cream and Barrie's.
The revitalization of Broadway took its first major step last year with the completion of a $6.2-million project funded by Yale, New Haven, and the federal government that included new sidewalks, lighting, parking spaces, and traffic patterns. Yale has since underscored its broader urban intentions with the hiring of Bruce Alexander ’65, a former top executive with the Rouse Corporation, which helped develop Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, Baltimore’s Harborplace, and New Orleans’s Riverwalk. Alexander, who assumes his new post as vice president and director of New Haven and state affairs in May, will manage the New Haven Initiative, a broad-based program launched by Yale five years ago to promote economic development and neighborhood revitalization with the help of University resources. Introducing Alexander at an August gathering in Luce Hall, President Richard C. Levin described him as “a man of great wisdom about what works in American cities.”
It might appear that by denying a new lease to the Co-op, Yale had decided that this particular true-Blue institution was among those things that were not working in New Haven. Yale administrators are quick to respond that they continue to see the Co-op as a major player in New Haven and are not trying to drive it out of business, although they have urged faculty members to place their textbook orders with Barnes & Noble. They point out that the Co-op has moved six times before in its history, and that although its new home adjoins the moribund Chapel Square Mall, the area is long on growth potential.
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Indeed, when the relocated Co-op opened its doors on Aug. 29, New Haven mayor John De Stefano Jr. called the new store a key component in the city’s broader plans to revive downtown. The Co-op is next door to the former Park Plaza Hotel, which is now being rebuilt—at a cost of $27 million—as a 300-room facility named Omni-New Haven Hotel at Yale. In the store’s immediate vicinity are several other major developments, including a $2-million streetscape project, a complex of more than 100 apartments in the Liberty Building across Temple Street, a courtyard linking the Omni to College Street, and a Temple Medical Center expansion into the former United Illuminating headquarters.
The Co-op had fought hard to stay on Broadway. (More than 2,300 of its members sent postcards of support to Lorimer’s office.) The store had the options of joining Barnes & Noble, downsizing significantly, or going out of business altogether, but its board of directors decided that a revamped Co-op could establish a different niche downtown. The new facility has 32,000 square feet of selling space on the site of the now-defunct Conran’s home-furnishings store. The relocation and renovation was carried out with the help of a $1.25-million loan from a consortium of area banks.
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“I don’t
always agree with Yale,” says
Co-op director Harry Berkowitz.
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“I don’t always agree with the way Yale makes its business decisions,” says Co-op director Harry Berkowitz, who now spends much of his executive time roaming the floors of the new store, assisting customers, and drumming up business. “But there’s no way we have time to look back. What we have now is an incredible ability to rebuild ourselves.”
Berkowitz acknowledges that one of the reasons the Co-op lost out to Barnes & Noble was that “we got complacent.” Many veteran customers agree that service was not what it should have been, the assortments were limited, and prices for such staples as stationery and even Yale sweatshirts were higher than those offered by nearby stores. A measure of the Co-op’s stalled status was the fact that the store had not paid a dividend in five years, despite returning to profitability in 1995.
Changes have been made to address those areas, including a new, 5-percent discount at the register for members until the Co-op pays a dividend. The store has also expanded its lines of men’s and women’s clothing, while emphasizing gifts, cosmetics, and home furnishings. Most important, in light of the competition from Barnes & Noble, the Co-op has changed the nature of its book department significantly by placing more weight on business-oriented topics. Its most dramatic asset, however, may be the sweeping views of the New Haven Green from the second floor, where the book department is located.
What began as an acrimonious divorce could turn out to be an improvement for all concerned. Yale is getting its national anchor store for Broadway, while New Haven is getting a prestigious retailer as an ally in the rehabilitation of the old downtown. Local leaders like Matthew Nemerson '81 MPPM, the president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce, believe that both the Co-op and Barnes & Noble can thrive in the city, because essentially they are in different districts. “I think the thing to remember is that the Co-op is not just a bookstore, it’s also a department store,” says Nemerson. “For a department store, it makes a lot more sense to be on Chapel Street.” Berkowitz is encouraged by the fact that while this is the first year that Yale has not given the Co-op access to the list of incoming freshman, more than 70 percent of the class signed up.
To make sure both New Haveners and Yale-related customers know how to get to his new location, Berkowitz hired a bright-red “Yale Co-op Trolley” to run continuously around the city, halting on demand at no charge to passengers. It made a colorful addition to the city’s traffic pattern, but passengers proved scarce. The current holiday season should provide a sense of whether Berkowitz’s efforts are paying
off. “By next spring,” he says, “we’ll all know.”  |
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