BY KATHRYN ADISMAN | Memorial Day weekend marked the fall of a West Village veteran, House of Cards & Curiosities, which has been on Eighth Ave. between Jane and 12th Sts. for 21 years. The cause was a combination of increased costs, Internet shopping and declining interest in the holidays, said store owner James Waits, speaking about a week before the end.
“It boils down to the fact we’re approaching a threshold point where the cost of doing business, unless you have corporate backing, has become untenable in this city,” he said.
“With more empty spaces and online competition, one would think rents go down, but that’s not what’s happening,” Waits said.
And tax write-offs make it more lucrative for commercial landlords to sit on an empty space than fill it with a tenant.
Waits’s lease wasn’t up, and if his rent hadn’t doubled (real estate taxes get passed onto tenants), he could have weathered local factors that contributed to his business’s demise. According to him, these included the Village Nursing Home and St. Vincent’s Hospital closures; a city construction project fencing off his shop for years; and bike lanes replacing parking.
One of the biggest factors affecting him: “The card industry is collapsing,” he said. What’s changed? “The devices!” he said, tapping his iPhone.
In dry spells, Waits depended on tourism to keep afloat. But this changed recently with the strengthening dollar. Yet, I witnessed a gentleman from Amsterdam, after some token haggling, buy a souvenir fish fossil for $60 — 50 percent off.
“You don’t expect to find someone like me in a little shop,” admitted Waits. He was born in Wyoming and grew up in Colorado, the son of a WWII vet electronics engineer who instilled in him a passion for intellectual pursuits. Waits admits that he was naive and that “having this business was an enormous education.”
A musicology graduate student when he moved to the West Village 36 years ago, he saw a “Help Wanted” sign in the window of Wendell’s book and magazine shop, started out as a book buyer in 1980 and became manager and card buyer.
The card store opened in 1992, and when Wendell Huston died of AIDS in 1994, Waits took over.
“That’s when it took a turn toward the bizarre,” he said.
Oddities imply “sideshow;” Waits prefers “curiosities” to describe the encyclopedic contents of his shop, which was stuffed with deer heads, skeleton mermaids, a duck skeleton priced at $500, Chinese silk lanterns, binoculars, shells, even an Annie Oakley action figure.
“What do I hope doesn’t sell so I can take it home? Those teeth,” he said.
He was referring to prehistoric Megalodon shark chompers. This is a shop my father, a prosthodontist, would have loved. Waits acquired inventory from the Maxilla and Mandible store when it closed in 2011.
His ambition as a child was to come to New York City, “not to go to Broadway, not to go to plays or concerts, but to go to the Museum of Natural History!”
Waits sat like a gnome inside his shop.
“Fastidious, not easy to work with. I won’t tolerate bulls—,” is how he described himself.
His employees were his contemporaries. Grace Hochstadt provided annual handholding as I searched for a Mother’s Day card. Never pausing to pore through the bins, I never knew what I missed — till now.
A steady stream of customers stopped to say goodbye and snag a few bargain relics.
“This is the Village I moved to,” one woman said. “It’s so particular.”
The city now, compared to when he moved here is, “sterilized…homogenized,” he said.
Four shuttered storefronts will soon be on his block, including the Chocolate Bar.
“I stuck it out as long as I could afford it,” he stated.
“The residents are so wealthy, yet nobody lives here,” one customer observed.
At the former Village Nursing Home, where an apartment sells for $10 million, Waits said he saw only one floor illuminated. People buy real estate as an investment now.
Waits hopes his customers will leave with a good flavor in their mouth.
“Alan Rickman came in,” he said. “He shook my hand and wished me luck.”
So does he feel like he’s going out on top, like Letterman?
“I’m not calling it retirement,” he said.
Asked what’s next for him, he said he’ll pursue his scholarly interests. He has a museum in his house Upstate. And…he plans to sell online!
His store was a refuge.
“You make your own refuge no matter where you are,” Waits said.
To quote one customer, “I’ll miss the beauty.”
