The Twilight of Midnight Special

New Midnight Special store last fall.
                                                         photo by James Allardice

Kevin Allardice
Mirror contributing writer
  
   Midnight Special, a local highly independent and thoroughly idiosyncratic bookstore with a long history of political activism, is closing its doors after thirty-four years – another casualty of the boom on the Third Street Promenade.
   Store owner Margie Ghiz announced the closing in an email, which said, in part, “Last year, well over 1000 of you gave us so much money, so much of your time and so much heart, to make sure we could reopen after 8 months ‘in storage.’ Unfortunately, the delay was too great and our debts grew with the delays. Only local outlets of major chains can afford the losses that come with opening stores; even though our sales were steadily growing, it was not fast enough to keep us going until we could sustain ourselves.”
   “Nothing will die when the Midnight Special closes it doors, because all of you and our staff of the last 34 years are the life of the Midnight Special, and each one of us is part of a much larger voice that cannot be silenced.”
   The store opened in 1970 on what is now Abbott Kinney Boulevard. Ghiz spoke about how, back then, bookstores like Midnight Special were popping up everywhere —- usually cooperatives started by students and others seeking places where different ideas and political viewpoints could converge.
   In the beginning, Ghiz was just another customer. She was searching for a book that she couldn’t find anywhere until someone told her about this funky little store in Venice called Midnight Special. She went by, and, sure enough, they had what she was looking for — a book by the then-obscure African American poet Langston Hughes.
   Soon, she became a volunteer at the store. Indeed, volunteers were Midnight Special’s cornerstones for years. In 1984, the store’s accountant calculated that volunteers had worked over 1.5 million unpaid hours since the store’s opening.. While today it might seem like employee exploitation, for Midnight Special, it was something to be proud of. From the beginning, people have volunteered their time and energy to the store because of what it has meant to them.
   After a number of years in Venice, the store moved to Santa Monica’s pedestrian mall on Third Street, which was as low-key and serene then as the Third Street Promenade is noisy and high profile today.
   For years, Midnight Special was one of the most popular stores on the mall – drawing customers from all over L.A. It was a bookstore with a definite point of view and people liked that.
   In the late 1980s, when the City set about to transform the quiet mall into the Third Street Promenade, both the City and Third Street property owners sought bigtime tenants.
   It quickly became a high stakes game, but a landlord who liked Midnight Special gave it a break – leasing space to it at a discount. That was the good news. The bad news was that both Barnes & Noble and Borders, the nation’s two largest bookstore chains, opened outlets on the Promenade, near Midnight Sprcial.
   Last year, Midnight Special’s landlord told Ghiz that he could no longer afford the discounted rent, which forced the store to move out. For eight months, Midnight Special resided in limbo – no store, books in storage, employees on unemployment — until a new location was found on Second Street, only a block away from the old store on the Promenade.
   Over the years, Midnight Special developed a loyal core of customers. Most of them remained true, and did not defect to the big chain stores.
   Still, the big stores did cut into Midnight Special’s business. What usually happens, Ghiz said, is that an independent bookstore, like Midnight Special, builds a market of readers, and then the chain stores move in and try to take over the market. When Barnes & Noble opened its big store just down the Promenade and saw that Midnight Special’s political focus attracted a lot of customers, it began holding its own “political events,” such as staging panel discussions with the Chief of Police and the Chief of the Fire Department.
   As opposed to the big formula stores, Ghiz said, “A good independent [bookstore] is an organic part of the community…. The community changes the bookstore and the bookstore changes the community.”
   When Midnight Special opened at its current location six months ago, customers came from all over to help shelve books and prepare the store — some from as far away as Las Vegas. But the store’s appeal has an even longer reach.
   When Ghiz sent out the e-mail announcing that the store was closing, she received responses from Denmark, Australia and Madrid — to name a few, from customers who had shopped at Midnight Special while visiting Santa Monica, and never forgot it. In fact, the man from Denmark suggested that Ghiz should move the store to Denmark.
   Another customer, this one a local, expressed sadness that the store was closing and told Ghiz that she wished there was a Midnight Special on every corner.
   “But I wouldn’t,” said Ghiz. “I wish there was a different point of view on every corner.”
   Indeed, she is both sad and angry that the store is closing, But it’s not the loss of the business as much as the loss of the store’s cultural and educational aspects that depresses her.
   At the back of the store, there is a large alcove – without shelves or books – that’s an art gallery. Last October, Ghiz received a letter from a man in prison in Pelican Bay. He had heard about the store, its penchant for art and politics, and asked whether it would be interested in displaying prison art.
   The exhibit, called “Art Behind Bars,” features the art and poetry of six inmates, all of whom were in solitary confinement. The drawings are striking, not only for the technical talent that they clearly display, but for their sheer visceral power. Most are in black and white, because, as Ghiz explained, “they aren’t allowed color in prison.”
   But there are bits of color in some of of the drawings because, Ghiz explained the men scrapped color from the pages of magazines and mixed the scrapings into a pulp which they used to color their art.
   It is things like this that Ghiz will really miss, she said. “This is what really matters.”
   Until its closure in the first week in June, Midnight Special will hold a final sale – 30 percent off everything.