House of cards and curiosities

House of cards and curiosities Standing at the back of the counter at his small Greenwich Village keep, House of Cards and Curiosities, James Waits surveys the adjustments which have affected many corporations withinside the area. “It`s a aggregate of things. Rent is a factor.”

We Found on the Soon-to-Be-Closed House of Cards House’s of cards and curiosities

House of Cards will near its doorways on May 31 after greater than two decades in business. Stocked to the ceiling with playing cards, presents, and curios, the keep — placed at Eighth Avenue and Jane Street — is simply one in every of a developing quantity of small mom-and-pop corporations in Lower Manhattan which have been pressured to shut their doorways because of growing rents.

LARA ZARUM, THE VILLAGE VOICE House of cards and curiosities

House of Cards and its buddies additionally had been pressured to bear 3 years of production to update and improve water mains alongside Eighth Avenue, and the closure of close by St. Vincent`s Hospital in 2010 (luxurious condos will quickly take its place) didn`t assist the keep`s cause: Waits says clients could frequently prevent in to shop for playing cards and presents to carry to patients, and the health center hired lots of people.

“This complete block is suffering.”

The keep — which famously boasts, “Never a Hallmark, here!” — opened in 1994. Waits, 65, had formerly controlled a shop throughout Eighth Avenue that bought magazines, books, and playing cards — “a classier comfort keep,” he calls it. He commenced running there in 1980, “so I`ve been on any such 4 corners for 35 years.”

The proprietor of that keep opened a card shop in House of Cards` contemporary vicinity in 1992, and while he died of AIDS in 1994, Waits took over and made it his own.After taking over, Waits added in an collection of oddball presents and novelty gadgets and, maximum notably, fossils, which he additionally collects personally.

He sold the myriad dinosaur teeth, shark teeth, and ammonites — spiral-formed shells that housed marine creatures many tens of thousands and thousands of years ago — from Maxilla and Mandible, which billed itself as “the world`s handiest osteological shop” while it opened in . House of cards and curiosities