Just read this bit of unfortunate news in an article by David Hendricks on the mysanantonio business section dated 4 September 2008.
"In one way, it has been a sad summer for downtown San Antonio.
For the first time in at least 87 years, perhaps much longer, the central business district has no general-interest bookstore and no prospects for one.
The last bookstore, the Brentano's at Rivercenter mall, closed in June. Brentano's had occupied its advantageous river-level spot beneath the 1,000-room Marriott Rivercenter Hotel for 20 years, since the mall opened in 1988.
The Brentano's chain is part of Borders Group Inc.'s Waldenbooks, its mall-only division. Rivercenter mall decided to make the mall's river level all restaurants, so the mall asked Brentano's to move. “We offered them a space. They didn't want it,” said the mall's marketing director, Brenda Dean Hockaday.The action adds momentum to the direction Rivercenter Mall, and all of downtown, is headed. Retail gradually is leaving to make way for a River Walk-led theme park of restaurants and entertainment. Dillard's closing in August at the mall, to be replaced by a food-and-entertainment arcade, is another example.
The closest thing now to a downtown bookstore is Central Library's nonprofit The Cellar, which sells books withdrawn from its shelves. It is open only four hours a day, except for eight hours on Thursdays. No recent books are likely to be found there.
Downtown is hardly the only part of San Antonio lacking bookstores. The East and near-West sides go without. A group of South San Antonio High School students lobbied bookstore chains for years before Borders Group opened a Waldenbooks store at South Park Mall in 2004. It still operates there.
Books-A-Million Inc. introduced its first San Antonio store this summer at Alamo Ranch Marketplace, a new retail center at Loop 1604 and Texas 151. Otherwise, the remaining dozens of San Antonio bookstores are clustered on the North Side.
Brentano's was not a fabulous bookstore. It was small, but at least it offered a well-rounded selection. The new releases, fiction, history, children's, self-help and business book sections were decent-sized, and its newsstand was handy for Marriott hotel guests and downtown workers.
San Antonio once possessed truly great downtown bookstores. An antiquarian bookstore, Brock's, started in 1967 at 136 W. Commerce St. Book lovers and book dealers from across the country enjoyed browsing the haphazard piles of used books, searching for hard-to-find volumes.
The most magnificent, Rosengren's Books, opened in 1921. Florence Rosengren operated it for decades at the street level of the Crockett Hotel behind the Alamo before Camille Rosengren took over. It later moved to Losoya Street before closing.
Every book on Rosengren's shelves was handpicked for quality. Whether a new release or a classic, Rosengren's thoughtful collection and personal service was rare. If someone saw the great old movie “Rebecca” and wanted to read Daphne Du Maurier's 1938 novel, Rosengren's had a hardback copy of it.
Authors were drawn to Rosengren's. Over the decades, events there featured poet Robert Frost and novelist John Dos Passos. Texas writers John Graves and Larry McMurtry signed their books there.
Both Brock's and Rosengren's closed in 1987. That was a period when a downtown street construction project called Tri-Party choked downtown auto and pedestrian traffic. Society's values had changed, too.
“No one thinks twice at spending $50 for a meal here on the River Walk,” Camille Rosengren once observed. “But they won't spend $15 for a book that might change their lives.”
Without a bookstore downtown, no one has a choice anymore. Downtowns everywhere need places where the unexpected can be discovered, where new paths may be found and where imaginations can roam and renew. If the heart of a city doesn't have a bookstore, doesn't that drain the entire city of possibilities? "
dhendricks@express-news.net
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