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Early Addition
East Village kitsch mecca Love Saves the Day (MySpace) will close next month after more than four decades in the neighborhood, Vanishing New York reports. Originally opened in 1966 on 77 7th Street, the day glo-painted shop moved down the block to its current location at Second Avenue and 7th Street in 1983, just in time for a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan, in which it's immortalized as the boutique where Madonna traded in her leather pyramid jacket for rhinestone studded boots.
The cluttered store was always packed with eclectic items ranging from funky threads to Star Wars paraphernalia to obscure pop culture ephemera. According to the Villager, the landlords tried to triple the rent in 2005, but owner Leslie Herson and her husband were able to negotiate a new three-year lease. Now it's 2008, and with rents declining, you'd think they'd have a better chance of hanging on. Of course, there's probably also a shrinking market for their inessential oddities.
Perhaps another factor, according to Racked, is that Leslie passed away over the summer. Her husband still maintains an LSD in New Hope, Pennsylvania (home of Ween), but that's small consolation when one contemplates the corner of Second and 7th without Love Saves the Day. No matter what depressing chain store comes in its place, it's now clear that we've officially become the old grouch droning on about how things used to be so much better in the old days. But they really were!
Photo courtesy S.D.
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wow, that really sucks. i love this store & always go in whenever i'm in the neighborhood.
Noooo! Where will I not buy He-man action figures and smurfs figurines from now? oh, ebay? nevermind. Cool ass name though.
This sucks. Although with the economy, it will probably won't wind up being a bank.
Sucks.
Will the non-hipster please turn off the light.
Well, in all likelihood it won't become a Starbucks, WaMu, Commerce Bank, Citibank, or a Bennigans. The bad news is that their greedy scumbag landlords will lease it to the first idiot to come their way who still thinks it's 2006.
The economy turns, tastes turn. While sorry to see this store close, if it doesn't really add value to the community, perhaps its time has passed. At first I felt guilty about buying meats at my Fairway instead of my local butcher. But at Fairway, prices are lower and it's more convenient (I'm already there, right?) Further, why should I feel guilty that I'm not supporting someone else's opportunity to have the quaint small business? If the business no longer makes sense economically, so be it. Circle of life, baby.
Hmm, yeah. Tell that to Ford, Chrysler, GM, AIG, Citi, lehman, et. al. The rules of capitalism only need apply to the big guys when it's in their favor. And vice versa. Can't wait for the next Chipotle to move in, yay New York!
"why should I feel guilty that I'm not supporting someone else's opportunity to have the quaint small business?"
you do realize that it's these "quaint small business[es]" that make nyc what it is right?
do you think that nyc would be what it is with a bunch of fucking wal marts & home depots??
you CAN'T be a native ny'er.
Of all the businesses failed or falling in Gotham, of all the changes wrought by gentrification modernization and rent-escalation, this is the one that hurts the most for me. It's one of the places that I truly embrace, that is the essence of what New York means to me. Its awning makes me happy, gives me hope, even in the most downcast of winter nights and the brutal psychic tolchuks that Manhattan can inflict upon you day after day. In wanderings, I frequently sidetrack my way over to 2nd Avenue just so I can walk down, break the borderland of 14th Street, and have New York tell me that no matter what's going wrong
LOVE SAVES THE DAY.
There is no genre for this store. It is sui-generis and when it is gone, nothing will precisely replace it. Future historians will label it "bric-a-brac" or "novelty" or "nostalgia" but it is all of this and more. I nursed a secret desire to be their stockboy so I could ledger in the pop plastic figurines collected from kids of three generations – all the characters of The Simpsons, Star Wars, Barbie, My Little Pony – the hats and masks and vintage jackets and flannel shirts and crenoline '50s ballgowns and Garbage Pail Kids trading cards and comic books. They have the big plastic X-Wing Fighter I had as a kid, as well as the smaller die-cast Millennium Falcon and TIE Fighter and dozens of the hottest Hot Wheels. On a circular table they display at least two Playboy magazines from every year from 1966 to 1988. It is an epic time capsule of American pop culture, a living, bartering, retail museum that will be dispersed into fragments and no one will ever again walk into a store and see, at one crazy pell-mell glance, the kaleidoscopic colors of American pop-culture history.
It is a store that exhilarated me, enlightened me, and gave me, through what I bought, parts of myself that I had lost to the greyness of adulthood. I am heartbroken, heartbroken, and I would do whatever I could to save the love, but it looks as though I can't.
^ Just keep hoping the Wall St. mess kills off greedy landlords. Then the fun and the funky will return like spring weeds.
These are the businesses that is the heart and soul of NYC.
Price and convenience sure have taken over service.
And while the landlords are partly responsible for this, it does go a little further up the real estate food chain than them...
Hi BabyHitler,
You like the name? You know what it's acronym is, right? Remember, it was started in 1966. LSD was still legal then.
dignam hit the nail on the head.
long live love saves the day!
I am beyond bummed. I put something up about this at The Clyde Fitch Report (clydefitch.blogspot.com). Why is my New York dying?
ngl. i gasped.
Some people with stones for hearts just shrug and attribute this to inevitable change.
There's a difference between changing and dying. Change implies something new takes its place.
New York is not changing, it's dying.
So so sad.
I must admit that I don't think I ever bought anything there, and was probably last in there in the mid to late 80's.
But it's been a fixture since about the time I fell in love with this city, and it was nice to have a funky tourist attraction/landmark in the neighborhood that didn't attract drunks or troublemakers.
I preferred Little Ricky's. But you know, with all of the old-toy nostalgia coming back and all the thrift-store finds that abound, LSTD wasn't all that original anymore. It was fun to look in, but way overpriced. I'd still rather it be there than a Starbuck's.
Maybe the proprietors of Big Fun in Cleveland and Uncle Fun in Chicago can open a store in NYC?
Boring
New York City is 400 years old
Things change
That is the very essence of this great city
If you don't like it
Then you don't like NYC
Deal with it
or Get out
Flash:
Spiritross likes Starbucks and shops at Duane Reade right after he took his money out of the ATM across the street.
This is spiritross' new New York.
IF you don't like it, leave, because spritross knows what he is ranting about.
where am I going to get my fake moustaches?
It's almost as if folks would prefer NYC to be more like LA.
Dude! This sucks! Half of the wall art in my livingroom is from this place.
Very sad to see it go. I'd say it's another nail in the coffin but that coffin was nailed shut years ago when the St. Marks Cinema became a Gap.
This is a good news/bad news scenario. The good news is the motive for Love Saves The Day relocating to Pennsylvania is NOT due to financial hardship or a heartless landlord. The bad news is widower Herson's beloved has departed this plane and that is the primary reason for the move [according to a recent interview with NY1 news]. When i moved to NYC 33 yrs ago, LSD was one of the things i liked best about this town. Years later...i live on the uws, and it's been a long time since i've hung out downtown. i think it's time to make the trek and say hello/goodbye to an old friend before she says farewell to the neighborhood.