DOWNTOWN — In the end, the most difficult thing for staffers at the Midnight Special Bookstore was sales were picking up — just not quickly enough to cover the bills.
Even sadder for some customers of the popular independent bookstore was that they’d only recently discovered the shop’s new location on Second Street. It opened there last winter, after being pushed off the Third Street Promenade by a spike in rent.
It didn’t last for long. After half a year at its new location, the 34-year-old liberal bookstore permanently closed its doors Thursday afternoon, ending a six-day, 50-percent-off sale that left its shelves half bare, and its longtime employees exhausted and jobless.
“People are coming in to say good-bye, and I’m not handling it very well, I’m not handling it very well at all,” said owner Margie Ghiz, a Sunset Park resident who first volunteered for the political bookstore in the ’70s. “I might just leave. It’s very hard.
“People do not believe we’re closing, they think we’re moving. They really believe that we’re permanent,” she added. “I just hope our ideas are permanent, because the store doesn’t matter as much as what we believe in. Too many things need fixing, and they aren’t going to get fixed by themselves... We have to do that. For that, I’m sad — that we’re not going to be part of it.”
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS Started in a tiny Venice shop in 1970 on the
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 9, 2004. Read the original PDF.