Landlords bust another cultural resource

Real estate is decimating irreplaceable stores with unique goods

Even supermarkets being kicked out for Duane Reade, reports NPRs Leonard Lopate

The big box stores which opened nearby five years ago - Target, Best Buy, Costco - in a mall of several stories at 117 St and 1st have decimated traffic along Third Avenue from 106 St northwards, a prime location for small stores such as the unmatchable Zooma.
This treasure house of video culture replete with classic VHS and DVD movies, muscular superhero dolls, home coin phones, illuminated keyboards, and other irreplaceable artifacts of a bygone era was stocked by Manny, who has ruled this Aladdin's cave for thirty years, about as long as his mother did before him.
Now it's all up for grabs by the few cognoscenti of NYC's rich past, since the greed of landlords has finally bust Manny's economics, which was already wilting under the drainage of his payday peak traffic to the North. The rent went up from $3800 to $6000 a month in the face of ever dwindling traffic. So much for Mayor Bloomberg's kindness to the real estate development crowd. One recalls the billionaire ex-Mayor's remark to Talk In New York when told of a nearby barber that was displaced by a Chinese takeout despite being a cultural institution whose walls were covered with mementos of a past when Italians ruled in East Harlem. The Mayor said "Well we let money decide here" as opposed to Britain. But he allowed, in a nod to how New Yorkers still did it, "if it was my barber maybe I would do something!" Now prices for the last two weeks in Zoom's existence are cut in half or even more for most of the treasures here until the last day of January when one of the city's great cultural institutions will be shuttered forever.