Upper West Side Strand Bookstore Gets Ready For April Opening

UPPER WEST SIDE, MANHATTAN — Famed East Village bookstore The Strand's new Upper West Side outpost could be up and running as early as the first week of April, in time for a series of events already planned for the uptown location, staff said this week.

The historic bookstore is busy moving into Book Culture's former 450 Columbus Ave. space, which it announced in February it would be taking over. Aside from two kiosks in Times Square and Central Park, the new location will become The Strand's only satellite from its flagship Broadway and East 12th Street.

Staff told Patch that the new outpost will open in early April, hopefully in the first or second week.

"At our current rate we should be able to open doors in the first half of April!" Communications Director James Case Odum said in an email. "Over the next few weeks the focus is repainting the spaces after which we'll be able to move in new furniture and start stocking shelves."

The opening will come along with a series of events The Strand has planned for April and early May at the new outpost, according to its website.

The first event at Columbus Avenue will be a book launch for author Matthew Lopez on April 15, followed by a two more book launch events, one on April 22 and another on May 5.

Owner Nancy Bass Wyden said last week that the line-up for the Upper West Side store will also include kids story time at 11 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

The store will include a "big kid's section" with an astronomy theme to honor the nearby planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, she told Community Board 7 members.

"We're going to bring as much of The Strand downtown to your community," Bass Wyden said. "We're going to have a huge collection that's curated to the West Side community."

The Strand's move uptown comes as the Upper West Side grapples with a retail vacancies and the closing of many of its small businesses, including Book Culture, which closed the Columbus Avenue location in January after its landlord had it seized for unpaid rent.

The Strand, which opened in 1927 in what was once called "book row" for its dozens of bookstores, has become somewhat of an outlier in its ability to survive over the years.

"We’ve just beaten the odds and survived and thrived thanks to our book loving community, our family’s hard work and our wonderful staff," Bass Wyden said.