“Let’s bring a goddamn bookstore to the Bronx.”

If you were around Manhattan in the 1990s, you hated Barnes & Noble the way you hated garbage strikes or Celine Dion. When Amazon, even more gargantuan and impersonal, emerged to send Barnes & Noble toward its inevitable descent, you eventually found yourself nostalgic for what you had failed to appreciate. In no place was the company’s diminished fortune felt as intensely as it was in the Bronx, where gratitude for what it provided far outweighed snobbishness.

Source: www.nytimes.com