Rent Hike Hits Beloved Drama Book Shop

NEW YORK — Over the past century, the Drama Book Shop, a legendary independent bookstore that has one of the largest selections of plays in the country, has survived a series of natural and man-made disasters: a fire that damaged a collection of signed first editions, floods, multiple break-ins and armed robberies (once, the thieves took the entire safe).

But can the store withstand another rent increase?

On Wednesday, that question alarmed members of the theater community, after news broke that the store’s owners would not renew the lease at its 40th street location next year, facing rising rents that have been suffocating struggling retailers throughout Manhattan.

Allen Hubby, a vice president of The Drama Book Shop, said the store couldn’t afford to pay much more than its current rent of nearly $20,000 a month, but plans to move to another location in the neighborhood and to remain in the theater district.

“We sell $10 plays,” he said in an interview in his office at the back of the store. “It’s never made anybody wealthy, but we’ve always been able to pay our bills.”

The store — which was founded around 1917 by the Drama League, a theatrical association — migrated a few times over the decades before landing in its current location at 250 W. 40th St. in 2001. But it has always been strategically situated in the theater district. Over the decades, acting legends and Broadway and film luminaries have visited the store — including Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Midler, Alan Cumming, John Lithgow, Kevin Kline and Cher.

The store has 20 staff members, most of them part time, and stocks more than 20,000 titles, including plays in translation and musical libretti from popular Broadway plays. Acting students often come by in search of monologues for auditions.

“There’s no where else in New York where there’s such a large selection of plays,” Hubby said.

It’s also long operated as a creative hub and incubator for new productions. The Story Pirates, a children’s theater group, practices and holds performances upstairs. The basement functions as a cozy theater space. “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda worked on the music for “In the Heights” on the piano in the basement. In 2011, the store even won a Tony Award, for “excellence in theater.”

“Name another Tony-winning bookstore,” Miranda said in an interview.

“We have to figure out what we’re going to do,” he said when asked about the store’s unique role for theater lovers and artists and the possibility of its closing. “That’s it.”

The Drama Book Shop is the latest independent bookstore in Manhattan to be squeezed out by stratospheric rents. Earlier this month, a brief panic swept through the literary world when the website Bowery Boogie reported that McNally Jackson would be closing its Prince Street store, a space it occupied for 14 years. After an outcry on social media about the erosion of Manhattan’s cultural institutions, the store announced on Twitter that it would relocate in June 2019, but plans to stay in the neighborhood. Before the news of the rent spike, the store appeared to be thriving: Earlier this year, it opened a large new outpost in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

While some took comfort in the Drama Book Shop’s 100-year history of surviving periodic rent hikes and other disasters, including rampant crime in Times Square in the 1970s, others worried the store might not land on its feet in a neighborhood where rent increases are driving out even large retail chains.

“This is bad news for the theatre community,” producer James Forbes Sheehan wrote on Twitter.

Broadway actor Alex Boniello, whose performed in “Spring Awakening” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” summed up the collective reaction from the theater world with a crying-emoji filled tweet:

“No!!! This can’t be!!!”