reflecting on the demise of Amazon’s proposed NYC headquarters
It was a Valentine surprise on Thursday when the retail and tech giant Amazon, after a long Atalanta-style courtship with cities around the country vamping to be its “second headquarters” that resulted in a bigamous engagement to Arlington, Virginia, and Long Island City, New York, dumped its New York fiancée at the altar. The bad vibes spread to the temporary liaison between New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who had briefly united in pursuit of the deal: Cuomo blamed critics of the plan for scaring off the suitor; de Blasio blamed the suitor for negligence toward the bride.
This particular knot is too tangled for our humble Notebook, though we have previously considered Amazon and the implications of its business practices for the life of books and ideas. But we do find ourselves reflecting that Amazon began its life as a bookseller — an industry with deep roots in New York City — and even as it has morphed into a “tech company” its claims on how information is stored and gathered and conveyed — no longer always in the glued-and-printed forms of ancient New York practice — remain mighty. I remember when a youthful Amazon sent emissaries to New York to try to figure out what this publishing business was all about. It is book publishers and booksellers who know from Amazon’s way of working — undercutting competitors, overwhelming with the might of its market share, suppressing the value of labor and laborers (including the writing kind). Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, the co-owner of Book Post’s winter partner bookstore, Greenlight in Brooklyn, told ABC news on Thursday: “It might seem as though bookstores in particular have the most to celebrate about Amazon’s retreat from Queens, but the victory is larger than that: it belongs to advocates for workers, immigrants, residents, and small businesses throughout our city … I hope this is a clear message to the leadership of our city and our state about what matters to New Yorkers: sustainable jobs, affordable housing and our city’s unique culture that can never be replaced or replicated online.”
That Amazon was slated to receive benefits not available to its competitors is not a novelty to those in the book world. Jeff Bezos sited his nascent business in Seattle to avoid sales tax, and mounted the search for a new headquarters when Seattle threatened new taxation to compensate for the company’s impacts on the city. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) reported earlier this month that Amazon will pay no federal taxes this year on $11.2 billion in profits. The hunt for an HQ invited municipalities to compete with each other in offering historic levels of luxurience in tax relief and other incentives, with New York coming out on top with an offer that included nearly $3 billion in estimated tax breaks, abatements, and grants. The frailty of Amazon’s embrace of civic responsibility was on full display throughout the exercise.
In the book business, where all this began, we see, on a much smaller scale, enterprises that open their doors to the life of the street and bring people in. Twenty minutes from the proposed Amazon site the publishers Melville House and powerHouse Books have their own bookstores that double as performance spaces. (City Lights in San Francisco was the pioneer of the bookstore-publisher model.) In another variant on bookselling as public square, former Book Post partner The Regulator recently began a program bringing scholars from Duke University into conversation with their neighbors. Firestorm Books recently joked in LitHub that they considered joining forces with a laundromat. Our own partner bookseller Greenlight has public programs nearly every day in its two Brooklyn locations: book groups, storytime for children, readings by authors, a Civic Engagement program for local social justice nonprofits, school partnerships, writing salons, and an arrangement with the neighboring Brooklyn Academy of Music. The ongoing and unexpected vitality of independent bookselling (once seen as lethally imperiled by, precisely, Amazon) is evidence that there is still life in a vision of retail, and perhaps business generally, grounded in human connection. Only last fall the beloved and relatively youthful NYC independent McNally Jackson was threatened with losing its Prince Street space; last week they announced plans to keep it and expand into two new locations. The Boston Globe noted recently that the arrival of Print: A Bookstore “brought a positive jolt of energy” when it opened in Portland’s East End in Maine (“It always bodes well for a neighborhood’s karmic health when an independent bookstore moves in”) and Atlas Obscura last month covered a tiny village, Hobart, New York, that found new life as a “book town.” Amazon, by contrast, according to a new report by Civic Economics and the American Booksellers Association cited by the publishing newsletter Shelf Awareness, was responsible for “540 million square feet of displaced retail space, 900,000 displaced retail jobs and $5.5-$7 billion in uncollected sales tax.” We have all seen the empty storefronts that online retail leaves behind and wondered what the cities and towns of the future will be like. Is a giant, self-contained tech hub that stifles competition, decimates street life, suppresses wages, avoids taxes, refuses to engage in public processes, and thwarts the growth of ideas really the future we’re looking for?
Jeff Bezos chose books as the germ for his “everything store” because they were “pure commodities,” interchangeable units, but this observation overlooks their essential trait: they are products of language, and language springs from people coming together; books are vessels of a shared life of culture, learning, science, pleasure, belief. They grow from society and society follows in their wake. The collapse of the Amazon deal calls on us to remember what Bezos forgot about books and those who care about them: people come together around the things they make and exchange, and these relationships are to be valued and nourished. The Amazon HQ2b collapse proposes an alternate vision of public-private partnership, of the public square, one that fosters economic diversity, welcoming common spaces, fair and competitive labor practices, opportunity for distressed and non-urban communities, affordable housing, sustainable infrastucture (ehem, helipad), as well as a hospitable environment for cultivating new ideas, diversity of views, and a shared civic discourse. These are values that were championed over fifty years ago by another pesky New York City organizer who got in the way of men with big plans, Jane Jacobs. Perhaps innovations in bookselling, as old-fashioned as they may seem, may, if liberated from the predatory threat of monopoly, have something to offer such a vision for today. Perhaps new forms of reading (cough) that speak outside the faceless grip of the tech monopolies have something to offer as well.
