This 1823 Federal row house on Greenwich Street houses Joanne Hendricks Cookbooks.
Heading north on Greenwich Street, you pause, your attention caught by a lace curtain, time-worn brick, a weathered wooden door. A plaque on the door reads, simply, “Cookbooks.” Welcome to Joanne Hendricks Cookbooks, an inviting store of antiquarian, out of print, and unusual cookbooks that has occupied an anachronistic space in a landmarked, two-story building at 488 Greenwich Street (just past Canal Street) since 1995. Joanne Hendricks founded the quixotic emporium after working in several bookstores and developing a passion for books about food—an avocation piqued when she began cooking nightly suppers for her young family. The shop (which has room to hold just four or five people, and which she originally used as a storage space) is stocked with whatever intrigues Ms. Hendricks, a mandate that embraces a broad range of topics. “It’s always thrilling when I have something people are interested in,” Ms. Hendricks said. The proprietress has no staff. Ms. Hendricks thoughtfully curates and shapes the store herself, from the selection of the books to the decor. The store brims with character. “I control how it looks,” she said, “I don’t work for somebody who controls it.” An attestation to this insight is the irregular hours that are the privilege of the eccentrically self-employed: A notice on the store’s website advises, “Text At This Number To Be Sure I’m Open.”
A further indication of Ms. Hendricks’s independent streak: “The furniture is my own furniture and I’ve put the store together myself. I work with color and patterns and only see the full vision after I’ve put stuff together.” As a case in point, she cited, “the wallpaper, which I found in a Vermont attic. It’s decorative and Victorian-looking, which has influenced the rest of the store.” Recent arrivals include “Romany Remedies and Recipes” (1935), “The Paris (Texas) Cook Book,” “The Diary of a Country Housewife” (1951), and “A Vindication of a Natural Diet,” in which Percy Bysshe Shelley admonishes, “never take any substance into the stomach that once had life.” When asked about the difficulties of running a small business in Lower Manhattan, Ms. Hendricks cited one particular dilemma: The historic building seems untouched by time, which makes it a sought-after venue for movie and television location scouts. “Filming on the block interrupts the flow of traffic, which can be a challenge sometimes,” she sighed. Describing her customer base, Ms. Hendricks said, “there’s a wide range of people. We have repeat customers, but some people just stumble in because this little old house catches their attention.” For more information on the shop, click here.
Separately, a culinary bookstore with a tenure that will be measured in weeks, rather than decades, recently opened at 111 Broadway. Kitchen Arts & Letters is part of the RE:Store program sponsored by the Downtown Alliance, which is creating temporary pop-up shops in vacant Lower Manhattan retail spaces, now through Labor Day. Managing partner Matt Sartwell, left, said, “this is a place where stories and legends and cultural myths and traditions are all valued and found. We really love to talk to people about these books and the food in them.”
Tonight (Thursday, July 23) at 6:30pm, the 111 Broadway shop will host a panel discussion, “The Space Between Tables: Third Culture Cooking and Belonging.” Inspired by the book of the same title, this confab will be moderated by food writer Bettina Makalintal, who will chat with cookbook authors Eric Kim (“Korean American”), Zaynab Issa (“Third Culture Cooking”) Hawa Hassan (“In Bibi’s Kitchen,” “Setting a Place for Us”), and Stacey Mei Yan Fong (“50 Pies, 50 States”). For tickets (priced at $15), click here. Any customers who find the culinary culture at Kitchen Arts & Letters habit-forming are encouraged to visit the pop-up’s mothership (at 1435 Lexington Avenue, on the Upper East Side), which not only will continue operation after Labor Day, but is actually America’s oldest food and drink bookstore.
Grace Glukhov
PHOTO OF THE DAY
The staff at Coler have a wonderful collection of pets!
CREDITS
The Broadsheet
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
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