A Lighthouse for Magazines

By  Nathan Taylor Pemberton

https://www.newyorker.com/

https://bit.ly/38IBFb0

The most recognizable newsstand in Manhattan’s West Village, Casa Magazines, had been open every day for the past twenty-six years, without exception. During Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, when power went out, Casa’s owner, Mohammed Ahmed, and his employee, Ali Wasim, used flashlights to sell magazines and newspapers.

Their streak ended this May, when two plainclothes N.Y.P.D. officers entered the shop and told Ahmed that he was in violation of the mayor’s executive order closing all nonessential businesses owing to  covid-19. After being assured by a 311 representative that Casa qualified as an essential business back in March, when the city restricted nonessential retailers, Ahmed had kept his doors open. Now the officers warned him that a violation of the order would result in a ten-thousand-dollar fine.

That same afternoon, Wasim closed the store, leaving behind a handwritten note taped to the storefront: “Taking it day by day.

Thinking & missing all of you. Please stay in touch.” While the shop itself feels like a mere compartment, spilling out of a wedge-shaped space on West Twelfth Street, to the West Village it is an institution. For “Westies,” Casa is a clubhouse and a weekend confessional. For destination tourists—that is, people who are not locals—it’s the only living shrine to print culture in New York City.

The shop’s closure came during a chaotic stretch for the media as a whole. The downturn set off by the  economic ruptures of covid-19 disrupted magazine advertising and distribution. For an industry already built on a fault line, the pandemic has exposed its precariousness, triggering a slew of layoffs and furloughs in the face of budget reductions.

Independent publications like the  California Sunday Magazine, which is sold by Casa, announced the end of their print editions, planning to move to digital only. The turmoil has carried into July, as the national conversation on racial justice, following nationwide protests against the killing of  George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, cast a critical light on magazines led by predominantly white, and financially privileged, mastheads.

Few outside the industry experience these tremors. But, for the past two decades, Ahmed has felt each vibration acutely, like a needle swinging a seismograph, recording as the magazine industry has shuddered and spiked toward a gradual decline. While the shop stood lifeless in blustery May, I reached Ahmed on the phone. Sixty-nine years old, he was at high risk for the virus and had left the city to stay with family in Delaware.

An immigrant, originally from Hyderabad, India, Ahmed did not waste his words as he explained, over the sounds of his granddaughter playing in the background, that the shop’s future was directly contingent on the industry’s own fortunes. He is searching for a large investor (“a big guy”) to come in as a benefactor. “Since 2010,” he said, “business has been going down every year. We were surviving, but now it’s very bad. I don’t know how long until it goes back to normal.”

The Casa Magazines employee Ali Wasim says he wants to sell magazines until the day he dies. Photograph by Sabreen Jafry

In just the past decade, Ahmed said that the number of magazines he carries in the shop has shrunk by a third. A thousand publications or more have disappeared in this time because, as he puts it, the world now prefers to “look with its fingers.”

Ahmed recognized, without a trace of pity or gloom, that the industry was falling apart and shared no optimism that a recovery could take place. It was, simply put, a fact of the situation. At the end of the call, Ahmed asked if this story would be in print; he let out a conciliatory sigh when I informed him that it would appear only on  The New Yorker’s Web site. “I don’t like digital. I like print,” he noted again. “But send me a link.”

In the face of large-scale tragedy, magazines can be dismissed as trivial pursuits for a privileged sect of readers, which isn’t exactly off base. But Casa’s steady existence is a kind of rebuttal both to this kind of thinking and to the logic of all-controlling editors. Ahmed’s shop inverts the hierarchical values of a magazine—that importance, taste, the promise of connection, and the creation of fantasy, and whatever else, flow from the top down to the rest of us—and suggests the opposite: it is people who confer value back to magazines. A shop like Casa doesn’t sell fantasy, or truth, in print form. Instead, it’s selling intricately designed and artfully produced excuses for people to step out of their lives and into a real community. In many ways, Casa is a living exercise in building the culture packaged in its magazines.

When the neighborhood first heard that the shop had closed, a GoFundMe page was quickly set up and small donations began to roll in. Many were accompanied with messages describing the store as if it were a cherished friend. “Casa Magazines is the heart and soul of the West Village,” one read. “Yes, it’s the wonderful newspapers and magazines they sell, some of which you will never get anywhere else in NYC, but it’s the humor and warmth and wisdom of Mohammed and Ali that make it indispensable. We can’t let them go. We need them in our lives.” There was a message from Luis, an M.T.A. bus driver whose daily Midtown West route stops in front of the store: “We love you all and stay safe!!!”

The page soon raised more than twenty-four thousand dollars toward Casa’s rent and utilities and supplier costs, with the rest covering Ahmed’s and Wasim’s wages. While the shop was still closed, its Instagram account was busy with announcements and stories that urged followers to support not just the shop but its neighboring diner, Le Bonbonnière, with equal vigor.

“Casa became a touchstone for people in the neighborhood,” said Happy David, who runs the store’s Instagram account on her own time, between work as a jewelry designer and digital-marketing strategist. Customers frequently take pictures with Ahmed and Wasim, as do the Village’s more famous denizens, like the actresses Julianne Moore, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Liv Tyler. “People tell Mohammed all kinds of things—if they’ve met somebody or if someone’s moved away or if they’re getting divorced,” David said. “You see kids lining up outside just to talk to Ali.”

David, an immigrant who lives in Astoria, first started coming to Casa Magazines at the behest of her sister Tammy, who wanted magazines she couldn’t find in Manila, their home town. “Everyone back in the Philippines always asks for  T Magazine,” David explained. Three years ago, she convinced Ahmed that he needed to be on social media to increase the store’s chances of survival.

I asked David if she thought print magazines were special in any particular way. She answered that, when she was a girl in Manila, her mother would take her and her sister to a nearby newsstand to get international magazines. “My sister and my mom got me into magazines growing up. I remember when my mom brought home a copy of  George. Being in Asia, magazines were our portal to the U.S. We could experience the same culture.”

Days after I spoke with David, she texted to say that the shop had been approved to reopen by the mayor’s office. The sudden go-ahead from the city was the result of some frantic maneuvering by two West Village residents, James Reginato, a writer-at-large for  Vanity Fair, and George Capsis, the C.E.O. of the neighborhood’s monthly paper,  WestView News, who lobbied Corey Johnson, the speaker of the New York City Council, and Freddi Goldstein, the mayor’s press secretary, for help. “Mohammed was distraught after the cops barged in, and I was outraged for them,” Reginato told me.

On Casa’s first weekend back, I stopped by the shop, which sits across from the West Village’s busy Abingdon Square Park. A small folding table was set up in front of the entrance. On top of it lay copies of the  Daily News, the New York  Post, and the  Wall Street Journal in piles pinned down by cans of Coca-Cola. Inside, Ali Wasim stood behind the counter, wearing a KN95 mask, as he took a FaceTime call. He turned the phone to face me, explaining that he was being interviewed by an Italian journalist. “This is a journalist, too,” Wasim said back to the pixelated woman on the screen. “You should ask him some questions!”

Wasim is a large presence in the store’s crowded space. His voice is a musical counterpoint to Ahmed’s controlled explanations, a contrast magnified by the store’s magazine-dampened acoustics. Wasim first came to the U.S. from Pakistan nearly twenty-five years ago and has worked only at newsstands in the time since.

Each day, he drives into Manhattan from Bayside, Queens, where he lives with his three children and elderly mother. The disorder set in motion by the virus is a direct antagonist to Wasim’s life at the store. The crisis, to him, is worse than Sandy or even 9/11, not because of flagging sales but for how it has handicapped his ability to be close to other people—the reason he sells magazines. “You cannot shake hands or hug people.

During 9/11, you saw people crying and you could clean their tears.

This is making the world more different.” Without prompting, he handed me a bottle of water and went to help a younger-looking man, who asked for a recent issue of  GQ with Kanye West on the cover. “I didn’t recognize you because of the mask,” Wasim told him, happily, after making the connection.

Outside, at the table, an elderly white woman waved a copy of the  Wall Street Journal toward Wasim, as she handed over several dollar bills. “I’m so glad you carry this!” she said before scuttling off. “Most of the older people in the Village have been cranky because we don’t have the  Financial Times this weekend. Oh my God!” Wasim joked through his mask.

At the end of my visit, I made my way to the register with a small handful of magazines. “Ah, you want to support Casa, too,” he said approvingly. I asked him if he had ever considered a life beyond the store should things take a turn for the worse. Wasim considered it only for a moment. Casa would survive, he said, adding that he’d like to sell magazines until the day he died. Then he handed me my change.