The Lights Go Out at Midnight

Reeve T. Schley
Mirror staff writer

   The Midnight Special bookstore, a community nexus for the last 32 years, will close its doors on the Third Street Promenade next spring, with no firm plan for its future.
   Always a hotbed of political debate, the store’s demise is a result of escalating rents.
   Its landlord, Walter Marks, Jr. has subsidized the rent for the last ten years, even paying for renovations to the interior and façade, effectively shielding it from the economic pinch that afflicted other small, home-grown businesses in the surrounding area.
   Several weeks ago, Marks told the store’s owner, Margie Ghiz, he could no longer afford to charge Midnight Special 20 to 25 percent of the going-rate, and that it would have to pay full-fare or vacate.
   “Wally believed in us more than we believed in ourselves. He pushed and encouraged us. He gave of himself, and his family contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a new store as beautiful as the ideals we strive for,” Ghiz wrote in a press release last week.
   Unable to compete with the mega-chains the store was sandwiched between, Ghiz wants to relocate in the Los Angeles area, and has not ruled out Santa Monica.
   “It depends on what’s available. It is a matter of figuring out what the best thing to do is. I would like to go anywhere that we can do what we want to do,” she said
   Midnight Special Bookstore opened its doors in Venice in 1970. Its founders were people interested in alternative views on American history, literature and politics in the midst of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. Within a year, two of those people were arrested and jailed for refusing to give the FBI the names of their friends and customers who were attending anti-Vietnam War meetings.
   It moved to Santa Monica a little over two decades ago, and now a simple letter in its window breaks the bad news to the many who view the shop as a Santa Monica institution.
   “I couldn’t believe it,” said Vanessa Mesner, a Venice resident outside the store this past Saturday. “I grew up going to that store, reading and thinking about the books on its shelves. I even attended some of the poetry readings. When I heard it was closing I came over just to make sure it was true.”
   Santa Monica Mayor, Michael Feinstein has been an outspoken advocate for the store and is working with the Bayside District Corporation — a city-funded public/private entity that manages the Promenade — to find it a new location within Santa Monica.
   He’s often found himself pulling up a folding chair for a political forum and panel discussion, calling them “fertile soil for the mind.”
   Many celebrities have browsed the store’s shelves including activist/actor Tim Robbins, politician Tom Hayden, and urban historian Mike Davis, as well as noted authors Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Octavia Butler.
   Today, poets still gather in the store’s community room every Friday for open-mike nights; local activists hold screenings of independent films and controversial documentaries; and bestsellers include titles such as Noam Chomsky’s “9-11,” Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” and copies of the U.S. Constitution.
   Never one to bow to political correctness, Ghiz recently placed Palestinian literature in the window while keeping the books by Israelis on the shelves inside. Ghiz frowns disdainfully on political labels of any kind and noted that she recently received a letter from an Israeli with a $10 check to help pay the rent.
   “I don’t think that you can look at the surface of any issue without studying the history and evolution of something. I think you have to look at the way people are moving for thousands of years before you can begin to understand them.”