A Bookstore, Finally, Comes To the Bronx

In no place was Barnes & Noble's diminished fortune felt as intensely as it was in the Bronx, where gratitude for what it provided far outweighed snobbishness. From a report: Five years ago when Barnes & Noble announced that it was closing the only branch it had opened there, residents and local civic leaders were angry and heartbroken and fought to save it. At the time, there were 90 bookstores in Manhattan. But the Bronx essentially had just the one, and now it would disappear.

Noelle Santos, who worked in human resources, was especially torn up. In 2014 she was on Facebook when she stumbled upon a petition to save Barnes & Noble. It pointed out how alarming it was that the Bronx was getting more and more cellphone stores and chain restaurants but would be left without a place to buy novels or training manuals or SAT preparation guides. Ms. Santos grew up in the Bronx, in Soundview, a rough neighborhood, and she stayed in the Bronx for college and graduate school. But she suddenly felt a radical need to do change things.

'Up to that point I had measured my success by how far I could get away from the Bronx,' she told me recently. 'I was disappointed in myself for thinking about leaving a community in no better condition that I had found it,' she said. 'I had never been inside an independent book store before I decided to open one.' On Saturday, she will open such a store, The Lit. Bar.

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