Doors Close For Good At Hoboken's Barnes & Noble

"I'm pretty bummed that it's closing," said David Riedy as he walked out of Barnes & Noble on the Washington Street bookstore's last day in business Wednesday. "It's basically the only really good bookstore in town. When you want something, this is the first place you come," Riedy, 39, continued.

Riedy hails from Glen Ridge, NJ, but for the last three years he has been employed at Wiley & Sons publishing house and said he's been a frequent visitor at the Hoboken Barnes & Noble.

"Sometimes when I need inspiration, I come here and look at books," he said. Riedy is a self-described "voracious reader," but admits that he has been borrowing books from his local library more often than purchasing them in recent years. He was one of many people who emerged from Barnes & Noble with blank looks on their faces, perhaps an effect of the listless atmosphere permeating the inside of the store yesterday. Many of the shelves appeared to have been long ago picked clean and a handful of shoppers browsed the under-stocked shelves in search of books marked with a white dot indicating a fifty percent discount.

The lackluster body language of those perusing the store's aisles was symbolic of the general sense of despair many have felt since the bookselling giant announced in January that it was departing from Hoboken, though not everyone is dwelling on the loss. Some shoppers lamented Barnes & Noble's demise in one breath and speculated on the future of the space it has occupied since 1994 in the next.

"Honestly, I probably won't miss it," D.J. Chapman, 20, of Edison, NJ, said about the bookstore's closing. "It is a bummer, but I'm curious what they're going to replace it with since it's such a big space. Maybe they'll put something better here," said Chapman, a sophomore at Stevens Institute of Technology.

To be sure, there has been no shortage of rumors swirling about town regarding what will replace the iconic Barnes & Noble and several people mentioned the various possibilities they'd heard through the grapevine: Staples, IHOP and Olive Garden seemed to be the most gossiped-about successors to Barnes & Noble.

But according to sources close to the search for a new tenant, those rumors are without merit and, really, little more than idle conjecture. Justin Stein, a managing director at Newmark Knight Frank Retail, is handling the landlord's search for a new tenant. Stein said a variety of businesses have shown interest in leasing the space—everything from what he calls national "full service" chain restaurants, like T.G.I. Friday's or Applebee's, to so-called "dry uses," such as furniture stores and sporting goods retailers.

According to Stein, Staples showed early interest in pursuing a lease, but talks with the office supply company cooled more than a month ago. A spokeswoman for Staples declined to discuss any interest Staples may have had in the space and said, "Our policy is to comment only on locations where we have a signed lease."

The chief obstacle for a full service restaurant, one that serves alcoholic beverages, is a 19-year-old ordinance on the books in Hoboken: The Five-Hundred-Foot Rule.

Enacted in 1991, the Five-Hundred-Foot rule prohibits a bar or restaurant with a liquor license from opening within 500 feet of a previously established business operating with a liquor license. Any bars currently located within 500 feet of each other were either established prior to 1991 and exempted by a grandfather clause or were exempted by a 1992 amendment that allowed for a limited number of licenses to be placed within 500 feet of each other in the southern waterfront redevelopment area, which extends from Newark Street to Fourth Street along Sinatra Drive and River Street.

Room 84 is located across the street from the entrance to CVS, 59 Washington Street's other tenant, and the entrance to Barnes & Noble is less than 500 feet from the entrance to the nightclub. City officials measure door-to-door by way of a legal walking route; they measured from Room 84's door north to the intersection of Newark and Washington, across the south crosswalk to the east side of Washington and south to the current entrance. Stein said even if the entrance was moved to the building's southernmost point, it still wouldn't clear a 500-foot distance from Room 84. Stein hopes the city would issue a variance or amend the law to accommodate a full service restaurant.

"I am hopeful that if a national or regional restaurant is the right fit for the building and the community as a whole, the city would see the value in working with ownership and the prospective tenant to issue a variance," Stein said. "This prime retail location is the gateway into Hoboken and it needs to have the right tenant."

The likelihood of the city issuing a variance to exempt the space from the Five-Hundred-Foot Rule is, historically speaking, less than slim. According to Suzanne Hetman, secretary of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board at City Hall, the city has never issued such a variance.

Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble isn't about to vanish into thin air. The building's landlord—Jeffrey Koenig of Washington-Hudson Associates, L.P.— and Barnes & Noble have reached an agreement that will allow the booksellers to remain in the space for the month of April while the company packs up its leftover inventory and moves out, Koenig said. That will give Hobokenites the opportunity to do some window shopping before saying a permanent good-bye. After all, that's what many in the Mile Square admit to basically having done there, which may be the at the crux of the store's departure from Hoboken.

As Stevens student Chapman put it, "I did more browsing than actual buying."