A small group of Upper West Siders rallied outside Book Culture on Thursday afternoon, calling for the landlord to allow the store to reopen after city marshals seized control earlier this week for unpaid rent totaling more than $100,000.
The majority owner of the store, Chris Doeblin, describes the seizure as a typical case of corporate greed plaguing the city and the country, but his business partner’s attorney and the building's landlord described a more complicated story—one of an over-extended businessman blaming others for his own mismanagement.
“Our intention is to keep that space as a bookstore and we're working hard to do that,” said Doeblin’s landlord Tim Quinlan. “It just won’t be Chris at the helm.”
Outside the shuttered storefront Thursday, residents wrote messages of support on post-it notes and stuck them to the store’s darkened windows.
“This bookstore is not just a business. People come in here for meetings, people come here for cultural events. For me this became the massive center after I had a child, that was a place where I connected with other moms,” said 33-year-old Ana Ryan, who’d come to the rally with her three-year-old daughter. “I figured out a way to tell a story that was not boring. I discovered things I could do with my little one; she met her friends here.”
Doeblin made his case to residents and reporters gathered outside.
“Whatever happened to this store, I think it’s just so powerfully indicative of the main problem we have in America right now," Doeblin said. "The wealth and control of this country is becoming so contracted to so few people, and a store like ours is not just a different small business, it represents a family that has an ownership stake in America. All we need to really survive is another half a million bucks in money we could pay back...We need to be undergirded by some financing, and we need to have the store open so we can get back to work.”
Doeblin has already raised more than a half a million dollars from sympathetic residents since last summer through a “community lending program,” after he went public with his money woes. According to Book Culture’s website, they’ve taken in funds from 92 donors, for an average of payment of $8,152. Doeblin says the store will repay the loan at 4% interest, and he’s still soliciting $5,000 loans with the goal of trying to raise a total of $750,000, according to the website.
People outside the shuttered Book Culture this week
But Peter Porcino, an attorney for John MacArthur, the vice president of Harper’s Magazine who owns a minority stake in Book Culture on Columbus, said they’ve been offering to bail Doeblin out.
“To the extent he’s trying to raise money for this store that he has no other source of funds is false. We are offering to lend him money, so he shouldn’t be saying to the public, ‘I have no other way to finance my store,'” Porcino said. “He’s trying to play some sort of martyr card...it’s all the elite that’s bringing him down, when I think it’s his mismanagement and his ability to properly run a business.”
Upper West Side residents are being misled about where their loans are going, Porcino claims.
He pointed to the promissory note describing the loan that lists Book Culture, Inc. as the company accepting the funds. That’s the company run by Doeblin alone that operates the three other Book Culture stores (two in Manhattan Valley and one in Long Island City)—not the Upper West Side location, which is owned by a separate company called Book Culture on Columbus LLC.
MacArthur outlined these and other claims in a lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court last November. He alleged Doeblin was taking out loans on the Columbus Avenue store and using it to pay off the debts of the other three locations, maxing out the Columbus Avenue location’s credit. Publishers stopped supplying books to the Upper West Side location unless the store could pay cash on hand, he alleged. MacArthur has also filed a federal whistleblower complaint with the Securities Exchange Commission, arguing that the crowdfunding methods used by Doeblin violate federal laws that govern securities.
In legal filings, Doeblin has denied the charges.
Outside the store Thursday, Doeblin said he was moving money into the company he alone controlled so he would assume all the risk, and added that he had paid the Columbus Avenue location back with several checks. He added that about half of the funds he’d raised so far had gone to pay off debts at the Upper West Side location.
Doeblin added that MacArthur won’t bail the store out unless he personally walks away from his own store. Doeblin co-founded Labyrinth Books at 112th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam, in Manhattan Valley in 1997; he then bought out his co-owners and rechristened Labyrinth as Book Culture in 2007.
“[MacArthur] is coercing me to leave for nothing, and that’s again part of the problem here, part of the essential problem we face in America is exactly that,” he said. “Why should my family walk away from something we built?”
Even if Doeblin loses ownership of the Columbus location, he still would keep full ownership of the other three locations.
A sign outside Book Culture after its closure, seen on January 7th, 2019
Quinlan, the building's landlord, describes a similar issue with Doeblin’s business practices.
“We tried to work payment plans and all this stuff and work with him, but he just...never really met those obligations,” Quinlan said, adding that Doeblin has had issues paying rent since 2016.
When Doeblin was served eviction papers before Christmas, the store owed $175,000 in back rent. When marshals seized control on Monday, that debt was down to around $140,000 after Doeblin made a payment. The store’s monthly rent is just shy of $38,000.
“At the end of the day, this closure is no surprise. This has been going on for over six months,” Quinlan said. He noted that his family rehabbed the Columbus Avenue building, as well as others along the avenue, decades ago. He also claims he assumed costs of the storefront buildout when Doeblin couldn’t pay when he opened in 2014.
“He’s told us straight up, ‘I have this portion of this month’s rent, but I have no plan for the rest. Just bear with me,'” he said. “We did that for a while, to a point.”
Quinlan’s mother ran a bookstore, Endicott Booksellers, from the Columbus Avenue location for 14 years before she closed it in 1995 when Barnes & Nobles put her out of business, he said.
“We chose Book Culture over other tenants who had stronger credit etc., because we thought, ‘It’s such a good use,’ and we’re big fans of his. He’s an important tenant to us,” Quinlan said, who added the two had worked together with city officials on plans to help local mom and pop shops. Most his retail tenants are local operators or small chains, not national ones, he said.
“Part of me still has a soft spot for Chris, I think he’s digging himself a really big hole,” he said.
Some at Thursday’s rally were aware of the complicated backstory between business partners and the landlord, but they were at a loss of what to make of the situation.
“To be honest I’m confused about what’s going on with the whole story. I don’t totally understand,” said Adrienne Jensen, 39, who came to the rally with three of her four children. She hoped they could work out their conflict so Book Culture could open its doors again, she said.
“That’s why we came today,” she said. “To support reopening it and letting them work and sell books.”
