{"id":34725,"date":"2025-07-31T01:18:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T01:18:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/34725\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T01:18:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T01:18:14","slug":"left-bank-books-versus-a-west-village-soros-mansion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/34725\/","title":{"rendered":"Left Bank Books Versus a West Village Soros Mansion"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n For two years, a teensy bookstore sat under scaffolding, which the owners say deterred shoppers and cut off their light.
\n Photo: Erik DuRon\n <\/p>\n

Jess Kuronen first noticed the low, piercing sound toward the end of 2021. It was loud enough to drown out the fuzzy punk she often played at Left Bank Books, the Perry Street shop she runs with her business partner, Erik DuRon. Customers would hear it and startle, putting down a chapbook by Audre Lorde or a Kathy Acker first edition to ask, \u201cWhat is that?\u201d Madeleine Alpert, who works part time at the store, described the sound as similar to dental drilling but more persistent: \u201cLike sonic warfare.\u201d<\/p>\n

The drilling was coming from the massive construction project next door, which eventually gave way to cartloads of rocks and dirt that wheezed out dust that clogged the air-conditioner. Kuronen started to curse the plexiglass shelves that made each speck visible. \u201cWe would dust. I would dust. Erik would dust,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd then a day later we would dust again.\u201d Scaffolding went up over the front window and stayed there for two years, casting the store in shadow. When I visited on a Friday in July, raw wiring hung on one side of the fa\u00e7ade. On the road, a chain-link fence blocked off a parking spot creating the illusion, from afar, that the store itself was blocked off. \u201cThat\u2019s a permanent installation,\u201d DuRon told me, adopting the artsy tone of his inventory.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n DuRon outside the shop in July after the scaffolding came down.
\n Photo: Adriane Quinlan\n <\/p>\n

Left Bank sells a tightly curated selection of esoteric titles on art, music, culture, and design and has been in the neighborhood in one form or another since 1992. It moved to Perry Street in 2019, where $8 paperbacks (a memoir by Playboy bunny Suze Randall) leaven the heavier inventory, like a $3,800 book of photographs (Alexey Brodovitch\u2019s Ballet) and $2,000 first edition signed by Langston Hughes. On the Friday that I came by, Patti Smith\u2019s first single (signed, for $2,000) intrigued a customer, who demurred and instead spent $40 on a book of Carlos Mollina polaroids. His daughter bought a hat. \u201cWe will sell hats to people who come in and don\u2019t buy a book,\u201d said DuRon. Jacob Elordi wore a Left Bank Books baseball cap during a shoot for GQ<\/a>. Addison Rae has one, too \u2014 a gift from DuRon after she stopped in. The store isn\u2019t Barnes and Noble. It runs on vibe, not volume. And the endless construction was throwing that off.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n Vintage magazines and rare or coveted books preen for buyers who wander in and feel inclined to browse. Adriane Quinlan.\n <\/p>\n

\n Vintage magazines and rare or coveted books preen for buyers who wander in and feel inclined to browse. Adriane Quinlan.\n <\/p>\n

And there is a lot of construction to contend with. Left Bank, at 41 Perry, shares a wall with\u00a0a former multifamily building that sold for $19.25 million in 2019 with plans to turn it into a single-family home. These double-wide townhomes have already taken over West 11th. Chipotle founder Steve Ells copied Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick (No. 273-275) and bought at the end of the street, at West Fourth, while another double sold<\/a> there for $72.5 million last year. The gut job on Perry Street included plans<\/a> to dig out the cellar, add a roof deck, and install a Turkish bath. Like so many wealthy buyers in the city, the owners used an LLC, but locals knew who they were, anyway: Robert Soros, the eldest son of George Soros, and his wife, Jamie Singer Soros. When I called her, she said she didn\u2019t know about emails that DuRon said he had been sending her since October and insisted she is doing everything in her power to be a thoughtful neighbor during the renovation. \u201cI can\u2019t wait to move in,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n Google Maps StreetView captured the construction when scaffolding was up.
\n Photo: Google Maps\n <\/p>\n

\u201cAt least they aren\u2019t Fox News people,\u201d said a neighbor, the painter Jo Ellen Van Ouwerkerk. Others were angrier; one called the work \u201cextravagant.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve been calling it the $20 million starter home,\u201d Kuronen joked. And DuRon wrote an op-ed<\/a> in the local Village View, a community paper that emerged from its own neighborhood fight.<\/a> The piece decried the neighborhood\u2019s \u201c transformation \u2026 into a wealthy suburb of finance capital\u201d and said the shop\u2019s sales had fallen in the wake of the construction.\u00a0(The Soros family had no comment on the op-ed.) Other old-timers were reluctant to alienate neighbors they would soon need to get along with or scorn renovation that looks a whole lot like what they\u2019d done. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for me not to feel like a hypocritical hater,\u201d said the film and advertising producer<\/a> Mindy Goldberg, who has lived on the block since the 1990s. She rented Abel Ferrara\u2019s old apartment, eventually buying the building, renovating it with her architect ex, and raising a family there. Still, the renovation across the street\u00a0\u201cdoes feel more intense,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n The closed sidewalk.
\n Photo: Erik DuRon\n <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n The scaffolding came down in June, but the chainlink and orange fencing in the roadway is still up.
\n Photo: Erik DuRon\n <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not like I\u2019m na\u00efve,\u201d said DuRon. \u201cI depend on affluent people.\u201d But something had changed. In his op-ed, he described the change on the block as a \u201chollowing out.\u201d \u201cWe need access to good material. We need access to people with taste, but also money,\u201d Kuronen said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m starting to worry that the taste and money are going separate ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jamie Singer Soros says she expects to move in soon, certainly by the end of the year. But permits for other brownstone renovations are pasted up and down the block. 34 and 36 both look empty with plywood blocking off doors and windows and permits outlining renovation jobs. Number 46 was listed earlier this year by a broker who said<\/a> it was \u201cripe for conversion\u201d into a double and No. 27 is being marketed to future buyers for its \u201cendless possibilities,\u201d including the opportunity for \u201cbasement excavation.\u201d<\/p>\n

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