I've posted before about how New York, and especially Manhattan, has been stripped nearly bare of its old, quirky shops--the ones that sold fascinating industrial junk on Canal St, for instance, have one and all been replaced by tiny storefronts all selling counterfeit perfume and watches--and how this has made the city, for large stretches, nothing but an open-air mall with the same chain stores and the same merchandise as in the Dubuque Town Centre (if there is one), but no doubt at much higher prices.
There are of course exceptions, though they seem precarious. There is a subterranean purveyor of model trains and plastic kits on Forty Fifth Street and it is indubitably quirky as is its goggled, high-waisted owner who dispenses N and Z-scale wisdom along with intricately detailed versions of 4-88-4s and pint-sized build-it-yourself Mysterions (incidentally, model-building seems a childhood pleasure now much lost to the ravages of video games--I defy you to try and find a model kit at WalMart--but I digress). There is also a stalwart sandwich shop on East Fortieth going by the rather infelicitous name of "Vaco e Pres" and it used to be run by Italians or Albanians and they made some of the tastiest heroes (not subs!) this side of heaven's gate; it is still there and they still make the sandwiches but it is owned by Vietnamese people now and one supposed one has no reason to lament that in and of itself (though I will hazard a guess they have no more idea what the name of the place means than do I).
However, the exception--the Oasis--of which I am posting today is on Forty Seventh Street and it has long been called The Mercantile Library--not to be confused with the much larger, much less elegant Mechanic's Society Library on Forty Fifth, or the Chemist's Club on Forty First which is now the hotel Dylan. The Mercantile Library recently changed its name to the Center for Fiction and I urge you not to become a member.
The reason I ask you not to join is because then you will help make the place more crowded and less an oasis. For right now it is, for those who can afford the rather reasonable yearly fee, a well-stocked three-floor library (with a great many older books not to be encountered at the NYPL branches) and a place where you can actually sit in a well-appointed room with books and plaster busts and leather chairs and rugs and hardwood floors and all the latest periodicals (on paper!), and read. You can stay as long as you like. They do not have wireless (though the writer's desks on a separate floor do and they cost a certain amount per month to rent). They do have a very good water fountain and they do have very nice bathrooms if I may say so. And like I said, you can sit in the well-appointed, clubby-feeling reading room as long as you like (reading books!); or you an sit at a table and read books or the papers and write or take notes; or you can, if you have a Blackberry, spend your time writing and answering emails though this would seem to defeat the purpose of going there.
For myself, I almost cannot believe the place exists. It is quiet, it is literary, it is not expensive for what it offers, and it is in the midst of a city so unkind to places like it that I fear (unless it is endowed with a fund of which I am unaware)it may one day close its doors and re-open as a Mongolian barbecue.
For now, I am enjoying the respite. I sometimes bring my own books to read there, just because it is such a relaxing, beautiful little place--clean, well-lighted, quiet. Sane, in a word--a quality much lacking in our culture of general cruelty and indifference. Did I mention the bathrooms were very clean?
