It got the Greenlight!
Fort Greene literary emporium Greenlight Bookstore celebrated the opening of its new Prospect-Lefferts Gardens outpost on Saturday, thrilling local book worms in the formerly reading-retail-deficient neighborhood.
“I’m super excited about it,” said neighborhood resident Bryn Keating. “It’s definitely great to have an independent bookstore nearby.”
The Flatbush Avenue store was up and running just in time for Small Business Saturday on Nov. 26, a post-Black Friday holiday that encourages shoppers to spend their money at mom-and-pop businesses in the weeks leading up to Christmas — and boy did they, the owners say.
“I think there’s a lot of genuine enthusiasm for bookstores on that Saturday, and people were really looking forward to having us open and were in a great mood to shop,” said Greenlight co-owner Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo. “We had a really busy day.”
Workers are still putting the finishing touches on the store itself — it will fully furnished by January — but the most important part, the books, are all moved in.
The new market boasts more than 10,000 tomes — a similar collection to the Fort Greene flagship’s inventory, although some tweaks have been made for local tastes, including more Caribbean texts and lots of kids books for the area’s glut of new families, Stockton-Bagnulo said.
“PLG has a strong Caribbean community, so we’re going deep in Caribbean lit, and there’s a lot of young families, so we have a really strong kid book section,” she said. “We’ll be watching to see what people are responding to.”
The store itself is in a controversial new 23-story luxury residential tower at 626 Flatbush Ave., between Fenimore and Hawthorne streets, which some Prospect-Lefferts Gardeners fought to stop, arguing that it will stick out like a sore thumb and cast a shadow over Prospect Park.
But locals aren’t holding that against Greenlight — if anything, its new digs means everyone in the area can actually benefit from the fancy new high-rise, Keating said.
“The residence that it’s going into looks really beautiful and it will be really nice to have a way to interact with the new architecture that’s going up, even if you can’t afford to live there,” Keating said.
Browse the shelves at the new Greenlight Bookstore [632 Flatbush Ave. between Fenimore and Hawthorne streets in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, (718) 246–0200, www.green
