Storefront Survivors / Raw Materials

Potential Title: Bluestockings: The Radical Safe Space

Featured Image: (from Bluestockings website, will be credited in final post)

Audio File:

Two Pull Quotes (Prospective):

“There’s this common misunderstanding, especially among the radical left community, that you’re not doing something unless its direct action and thats simply not true. For a space to make a conscious decision in what they carry- the existence of a space like this and the thought that goes behind what is stocked- are definitely doing something already.”

“We have zero employees. Nobody is paid here. Legally an S corp owner does have to collect any profits made at the end of the year, but we try to spend all the money that we make throughout the year and put it back into the store before the end of the year. Any “profits” that an S corp member claims are not taken.”

More photos I may use (taken by me):

All notes:

Walking down the streets on the Lower East Side, Juan and I walked by several cafes, some Jewish bakeries and delis, a few grocery stores and liquor shops, a fur and leather outlet, several clothing stores, and a wide myriad of different businesses. On a Saturday afternoon, business was booming. Having spoken to many owners and staff who were too busy to allot us some time, we were ready to come back to Brookdale when I noticed a glass window with a handwritten sign saying, “Black Lives Matter.” A few feet further, another one said, “No Ban! No Wall!” I walked in and pulled my partner in with me.

Bluestockings is a bookstore, but it was clearly not just that. Shelves lined the walls, there was a large discussion group sitting around a table, a section shelling Diva Cups, stickers, and notebooks, and a small area selling coffee and tea. I was intrigued. After speaking to Ashley and Maria, two dedicated volunteers, I realized we found a gem. Bluestockings is registered as an S corporation, with no one owner being able to own the majority of shares. There are no employees! Nobody is paid. All of the “workers” volunteer their time, and in general, a lot of it. Any profits are put back into the store and into taxes. “No money is claimed outside of general expenses,” Maria explains. “We come in because we’re happy to be here,” Ashley says, and Maria chimes in, “Yeah this is not our shift, either of us.”

According to Maria, Bluestockings opened in 1999 and was originally a privately-owned women’s bookstore. A few years later, the owners were able to secure the next door location. It was bought by a collective, tackling a more intersectional scope. They are mission aligned. “We are an intersectional feminist base. We strive to curate through that lens.” But they strongly believe in intersectionality, and that issues such as race, class, and gender are not independent of one another.

As we talked about the area, Maria noted that, “We pay Lower East Side rent. It’s a crazy disparity. It’s very difficult to run a shop like this in New York.” Info shops across the world simply don’t have as much overhead as Bluestockings does. However, “Our landlord is very keen on keeping consistent rent,” the ladies remark.

But there are some good things about the location. “Whenever there’s a pro, there’s a con too. The amount of traffic we get, how easy it is for someone who barely speaks English who’s looking for the radical spot in New York. They don’t know where else to go. They don’t know a place that is consistent enough.” Being located in such a populated area, many visitors are able to come in. Not only that, but the location is accessible, with a subway nearby. Additionally, keeping the location the same for so many years has allowed Bluestockings to be so successful. They have had people come back from 15 years ago because the location has not changed. “So many areas from ten years ago, they don’t exist anymore. The neighborhood has changed tremendously. Gentrification is a huge thing here. This used to be where you would move if you couldn’t afford your rent.” Keeping Bluestockings in the same area has given it stability as a shop, something many places cannot say.

In addition, given the evenings on the lower East Side, it is also nice for the store to be open 11 to 11 so there’s a sober option available for residents in the community.

We spoke about the content of the bookstore and what it does besides sell books. “We host events almost every single day. We host discussion groups during the day and presentation-style events at night. All our bookshelves are on wheels.” The volunteers host book readings and Open Mic. Eileen Myles did her recent book launch there. They also host the Icarus Project centered around mental health and the Women’s/Trans’ Poetry Jam.

The bookstore/info shop also has Tuesday morning yoga. “There’s no real talking in a yoga class but just to have a space that is inclusive regardless of if you come in and you’re disabled or you come in and your trans, and you don’t want people to be all up in your grill, you’re just trying to do some yoga. I think it says something especially considering there is a hot yoga place upstairs.”

I asked the ladies about the section with products such as Diva Cups. Maria replied, “We try to be a resource for the community.” After discussing for a while she remarked, “There’s this common misunderstanding, especially among the radical left community, that you’re not doing something unless its direct action and thats simply not true. The fact that a person can come in and have a conversation that normalizes the topics that we have here. A CVS denormalizes it [Diva Cups] by not having it in stock. It’s about normalizing these things. Gender aside, literally half the people on this planet menstruate. it’s not everyones favorite topic but still you buy stuff for it. For a space to make a conscious decision in what they carry- the existence of a space like this and the thought that goes behind what is stocked, are definitely doing something already.”

Maria and Ashley sat with us for nearly forty minutes as we discussed multiple aspects of this bookstore. Extremely friendly and articulate, they were so filled with passion for the bookstore that it seemed to be a conversation between acquaintances, and not an interview. Truthfully, it was a learning process for us as college students.

As a storefront business located in the Lower East Side, Bluestockings is, admittedly, not where you would go to find mystery novels or talk about men’s health. “The idea of a space is that it’s finite. We’re not a general bookstore. If people want to have a conversation about men’s rights, this is not the place.” But, that aligns with the mission of the bookstore, its feminism, and its intersectionality. It is a safe space for those who need it and its success may be accredited to its stability and dedication to the cause.

Zooming Out, Zooming In:

Blue Stockings is located at 172 Allen Street on the Lower East Side. Using Social Explorer, I looked into the demographics of the Lower East Side, and specifically, of Census Tract 30.01 where Blue Stockings is located.

In the census tract, 57.925% of the population above 15 is unmarried. There is nothing too unusual about this, as the Lower East Side is quickly becoming known as a spot for singles while it was also known as a center for families before. 45.38 % of residents are female, which is a relatively even ratio.

About 66 percent of residents are employed. In the Lower East Side overall, anywhere from 50-70 percent of residents are employed. This isn’t too much of a contrast with the rest of Manhattan- there are many students and youth with a better economic background moving into the area, and as with everywhere there are residents with pension and disabilities who do not work. The majority work in the private sector.

The table below depicts the types of employment of residents- a large percentage are in retail, information, arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation, and food services. A large portion work in professional, scientific, technical, management, administrative, educational, health, social services, and waste management services. I believe that retail, entertainment, and food services make sense in context of the region. In terms of arts and recreation, I believe that the Lower East Side has changed and become less of a residential area and more of a recreational area, with stores, food, and artistic and unique spaces, such as Blue Stockings, making it memorable.

I hypothesize that the people on the streets are usually not residents of the area. They may be New Yorkers from different regions and tourists from different states and countries. This would make sense because the ladies at Blue Stockings mentioned that they get a lot of traffic, and a lot of different people come in (although of course there are the regulars). They mentioned that many visitors barely speak English and many visitors are minorities. The ladies also mentioned just how expensive Lower East side rent is.

According to Social Explorer, the median household income in the census tract was $34,826 in 2000. We see that the Lower East Side in general seemed to have a much lower median household income than the rest of Manhattan. Perhaps this indicates a contemporary gentrification, occurring later than that in other regions of the city. According to nyc.gov, “Despite significant demographic changes during this decade, the Lower East Side is still home to a large foreignborn population and moderate-income households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 actually grew by 30%, but higher income households are also growing at a much faster rate. While median household income rose dramatically from $24,192 to $39,082 it is still substantially below the New York City median household income of $50,173. It is safe to say, however, that if current trends continue the Lower East Side will be out of the reach to all but the most affluent New Yorkers, with the exception of residents living in New York City Housing Authority apartments or in other government subsidized housing.” A sign of this gentrification is how 44.219% of the population in the census tract in 2000 lived in a different house in 1995, and that is only a five year difference! I can only imagine how many residents have been displaced until present time.

Blue Stockings staff has definitely voiced that gentrification as been an issue. The clientele at Blue Stockings is very diverse, but so is the neighborhood, ethnically.

43.883 percent of the population is white, and this white population is still very diverse- the ancestry of residents ranges from German to Irish to Italian to Swedish. And there are families with origin in the West Indies and Caribbean.

Perhaps Blue Stockings DOESN’T necessarily meet local demands. Visitors are oftentimes not residents of the area. Only time will tell if the new “hipsters” moving into the gentrified area will cause Blue Stockings to be more of a local phenomena. But I don’t think that is essential to its success to be honest. For the groups that Blue Stockings caters to, Blue Stockings is an INTERNATIONAL phenomenon, not just a local one, which is what makes it so successful.

Looking Forward, Looking Back:

Bluestockings bookstore was opened relatively recently, in 1999. It is a feminist bookstore with an intersectional scope. Bluestockings was actually named after the Blue Stockings Society, which was an English movement to promote female authorship and literary advancement in the mid-18th century. It was opened by Kathryn Welsh and a silent business partner and a group of volunteers, but went through financial distress in 2002. The collective disbanded and Welsh took over. In 2003 she decided to sell the bookstore. Brooke Lehman purchased Bluestockings and assembled a six-person collective to operate the space. The entire mindset of the business changed. In 2005, the store took over the vacated next door space..

Unfortunately, because the business is relatively new, it was very difficult to find any sources. Nonetheless, we explore any existing articles.

First, we wonder why the bookstore began to decline in success. According to data provided by the Alliance for Downtown New York, 90 percent of Lower Manhattan stores saw revenues decline for a full year after the [9/11] attacks — and 47 percent of the neighborhood’s retailers, services and restaurants reported layoffs. So it is possible that this had something to do with the unsuccessful era the business experienced. Customers really just weren’t interested in anything at that point.

The oldest source I found was from 2000, when Hillary Chute wrote, “About a year old and as unlike Barnes & Noble as a bookstore could be, the comfortably ratty Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore and Café stocks a collection of great old and new feminist-minded books of fiction, nonfic- tion (theory and politics mostly), poetry, and comics—like Ariel Schrag’s brilliant high-school epic Potential and the Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist series. And while their selection could use some beefing up (there’s a lot of valuable but familiar second-wave stuff), that’s what the clipboard on the wall is for—suggestions.” Clearly no business wants to be named “comfortably ratty,” so perhaps the physical aspect of the shop was an issue.

However we also know that Welsh opened the bookstore as a bookstore for women. Perhaps that angle wasn’t successful. In 2004, Kathryn McGrath published  “Pushed to the margins: the slow death and possible rebirth of the feminist bookstore.” in Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources. McGrath notes that Bluestockings, upon reopening, has “new owners and a revamped mission that defines the storefront as a radical bookstore and activist resource center—but not specifically a women’s space.” The number of independent booksellers in general has decreased due to deep-discount bookstore chains and online book marts, and this was noticeable in 2004 as it is now. Feminist bookstores have fared no better than their peers. McGrath cites data to exemplify this- in 1997, there were 175 feminist bookstores in North America, in 2004 there were 44, and my research has shown me that there are now only 13 in 2017. Why? McGrath said that as once-radical feminist ideas have become accepted as mainstream, “the spaces that nurtured the movement that produced those ideas are vanishing.” Feminist bookstores simply don’t have as many resources or financial means, but their power is immense. Bluestockings to McGrath and many other strong feminists was just another example of a declining feminist bookstore, which if closed, would have contributed to the loss of feminist literature or literature that doesn’t have mainstream appeal. This point she makes is perhaps the reason why Bluestockings reopened without being strictly feminist, and instead took on a more intersectional scope with hopes to advance radical ideas and provide a safe space for people of underserved and underrepresented groups. McGrath argues that this overlap makes sense because, “Feminist politics, after all, have always included social justice—and many of globalization’s problems affect women disproportionately—so the overlap is hardly surprising.”

In an interview with Kimmie David, one of the six collective owners, in July 2008 (published on bookslut.com), David states that after reopening, Bluestocking didn’t stay strictly a women’s bookstore and is inclusive in not just the gender issues and the transgender issues, but with all people that are underrepresented and oppressed. So once again, we see this new intersectional approach, versus focusing on just feminism. After reopening, the name was actually shortened to Bluestockings Bookstore, had a new non-hierarchal model of governance, and “a major change in staffing which opened up the workers’ collective to include not just women, but also people who identify as transgender, genderqueer, and non-transgender men.” The store also became run by a very large volunteer base. The store is also run by a large volunteer-base.

In 2014, Senti Sajwal wrote on article on Mic which resounded with McGrath’s statement of feminism no longer being a mainstream interest. Sajwal cited how in the early 1970s, feminist bookstores began popping up across the United States as the feminist movement gained mainstream visibility. So while feminist bookshops used to fill a specific demand, “the advent of the Internet, the Kindle and competitive pricing at major retailers has made such niche materials much more accessible.” On Bluestockings, Sajwal wrote about its designation as a “safer space,” a place for like-minded people to share their views, and how with the Black Lives Matter movement expanding and issues of gender and sexuality becoming more prominent, Bluestockings has found itself as a kind of clearinghouse for tolerance and radical ideas. In fact, a customer said that what originally attracted her to Bluestockings was its “selection of black women poetry.” This reiterates that the bookstore may have not survived had it not taken other underrepresented communities, apart from women, into account.

In the past few years, Bluestockings has appeared in the NY Times for a Bystander Intervention/De-escalation Workshop, and other news sources for its decision to screen and then drop two award-winning documentary films this coming Saturday that have controversially been banned twice in London, UK, because they question the orthodox treatment of HIV and AIDS championed by the major pharmaceutical companies.

Bluestockings also turned to crowdfunding in 2015 to support badly needed repairs they were not able to fund due to rising rent. And so, it has been featured in articles as one of only 13 feminist-identified bookstores in the United States and Canada, and in local newspapers (such as NYU Local and the Bowery Boogie) as the local radical bookstore. But even before then, it was featured as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum Merchant of the month.