Midnight Special Bookstore to open on Second Street
The Midnight Special Bookstore has found a new home in downtown Santa Monica.
Owner Margie Ghiz announced over the weekend the popular independent bookstore will reopen next month at 1450 Second St.
The new location is next door to Italian restaurant Buca di Beppo and across the street from Jinky’s, a new breakfast and lunch cafe.
Ghiz said on Monday she will throw a store-warming party as soon as Midnight Special has moved in to its new 7,500-square-foot space, sometime between June 15 and July 1.
“There are 5,000 people on our mailing list and we are going to invite every single one of them,” she said enthusiastically. “It’s going to be cheap wine, but we are going to have wine. And maybe some carrot sticks and that’ll be it — but we are going to have a party.”
Earlier this year, city officials and local residents rallied behind the bookstore after it closed its Third Street Promenade location it had been in for 10 years.
They worried Ghiz would take her bookstore, which regularly hosted political gatherings and poetry readings, to Hollywood or elsewhere and said the store was a unique feature of downtown Santa Monica.
Midnight Special opened in 1970 in Venice and moved to the first of two locations it held on Third Street in 1980. The store carries about 80,000 rare and difficult-to-find titles.
Ghiz said she was forced to close after the landlords at her Promenade location decided they could no longer afford to subsidize the rent at her 5,000 square-foot store.
She paid about $12,000 per month in rent for a location that can command about $50,000 at market value, her real estate broker Leslie Webster said.
Ghiz said the rising cost of rent on the Promenade makes it prohibitive for independent stores to survive there.
“It’s more than outrageous, it’s like we’ve all gone insane,” she said. “Most people in the United States don’t make that kind of money in a year. It’s like these companies are buying billboard space. I’m sure they just write off the rent as an advertising expense. Who can afford that?”
Ghiz will pay $14,500 per month for the new location, a price Webster said is hard to beat.
“It’s a phenomenal deal,” she said. “I think it’s the best economic deal in the entire Bayside District.”
Webster, a retail leasing specialist for Metropolitan Pacific Real Estate Services, said residents can expect more retail growth on the streets surrounding the Promenade.
“There are others that are going to follow her shortly that I know about,” said Webster. “I think it will really start a new trend that Margie and the Midnight Special will pioneer.”
“I think it will really start a new trend that Margie and the Midnight Special will pioneer.” — — LESLIE WEBSTER Real estate broker
Midnight Special is sub-letting its new space from Intervisual, an advertising and promotion company that has been in Santa Monica for about 10 years, its president Jim Richwine said.
Ghiz said she is not waiting for the new four-year contract to expire before looking for yet another space, though she’s hopeful the landlords of the new location will extend her contract when it ends.
She said she’s learned from the past few months, when she lost about $200,000 in revenue by not being open.
“It isn’t just sales,” she said. “It’s continuity. And in a store like ours, that’s much more important. Much more tangible and much more important.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 13, 2003. Read the original PDF.