No bathroom, cafe, or couches: New Center City Barnes & Noble is highly curated, but not designed for lingering

Barnes & Noble’s new location on Chestnut Street marks a new beginning for the company in Philadelphia, while embodying the corporation’s changing national strategy.

It is one of the 30 new stores the company is opening in 2023, after years of uncertain prospects. Like its other freshman counterparts, it will have a smaller footprint and a modern airy feel without the green and slate gray detailing of the older stores.

“Our vision for this store is to make a Barnes & Noble that reflects Philadelphia,” said Lynn Rosen, the manager for the new store at 1708 Chestnut St. “We’re going to become part of the literary fabric of the city.”

The company’s CEO, James Daunt, is giving more freedom to store managers to stock products that reflect the surrounding community. In Center City, that will mean a focus on books about Philadelphia, partnerships with local museums that reflect their exhibits, and a stock of novels that appeal to sophisticated literary tastes. South Jersey stores, located on the way to the Shore, will stock beach reads more prominently.

The store is about 5,000 square feet smaller than the old Rittenhouse Square location but will actually have a larger staff to ensure that customers can always find a knowledgeable bookseller. It also offers a large collection of vinyl, an array of tasteful gift cards from Paper Source (which Barnes & Noble acquired), and a staggering array of Legos.

On the first floor near the entrance there are tables flush with popular and cosmopolitan book selections such as Crying in H-Mart and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Upstairs there is a wall of New York Review of Books Classics, a staple of the urban intelligentsia.

Rosen said that many of the store’s new touches, including the curated selection, are tailored to the kind of customers still smarting from the loss of the delicately charming Center City bookseller Joseph Fox. A couple other independent bookstores have recently closed, too, including Shakespeare & Co. and, in University City, the Penn Book Center.

“We’re very sensitive to the absence of Fox, and we have a number of displays in the store that we have specifically crafted for their customers,” said Rosen.

Another big difference from the Walnut Street location is the lack of a cafe or a public bathroom, which are in increasingly short supply throughout Philadelphia. The public seating options are also diminished, although a handful of comfy chairs still dot the new store.

Rosen said the decision about the cafe and public restrooms was made above her pay grade. A company spokesperson said the lack is simply because the new space did not have appropriate facilities.

As one of the only toilets accessible to those who weren’t necessarily buying anything, the old Barnes & Noble restroom saw extensive use.

“There are very specific challenges to having a city store,” Rosen said. “When I was raising my children a couple blocks away, one of the first things everybody said about that store was, oh, the bathrooms at Barnes & Noble are terrible. We won’t have that issue here.”

Many urban Barnes & Noble have seen stagnating sales since remote work gutted the office sector. A New York Times paean to the chain noted that the San Francisco-based author had to drive his kids half an hour to the nearest location because there is no Barnes & Noble in the city.

But the Walnut Street location did not suffer from that same affliction, despite the decline in office workers and, until recently, tourists. Philadelphia has an unusually large downtown population for an American city, which helped sustain sales, as did Rittenhouse Square’s citywide draw.

Sales at the Walnut Street location had returned to pre-pandemic levels before its closure, according to a company spokesperson.

“I would say it bounced back faster than our projections at that store,” said Jeremy Tamburello, assistant manager. “We had every population, not just those who lived and worked downtown. People coming from North Philly, West Philly, South Philly. We were that bookstore where they could come and gather.”

The new Chestnut Street location is not designed to have the same kind of draw because it is no longer on Rittenhouse Square and lacks couches or a cafe. It will be more of a destination bookstore in a downtown in dire need of one and less a space to congregate and hangout.

For Philadelphia’s independent bookstores, the return of a new, sleeker Barnes & Noble is not cause for concern. Rosen used to run a bookshop in Elkins Park called Open Book and is able to tick off other shops she loves, such as Head House Books off South Street and A Novel Idea on East Passyunk.

“The other independent stores in the city are not so close to us,” Rosen said. “With the closing of Joseph Fox, there isn’t anybody in this part of the city, so I feel like we have a hugely important job.”

Once the bête noire of the literary world — anyone remember the plot of You’ve Got Mail? — the company is now trying to echo the successes of independent bookstores, which have flourished nationally over the last decade. The American Booksellers Association notes that almost 500 new independent bookstores have opened since the pandemic, riding a tide of strong physical book sales.

“I view Barnes & Noble much differently than I did 15 years ago,” said Richard De Wyngaert, owner of Head House Books. “I believe they are an important part of a healthy bookselling landscape.”

The new store will open at 10 a.m. Wednesday.