Bookstore's closure could turn new page for downtown

Another downtown Beaufort business announced this week that it will soon shut its doors. This time it was Bay Street Trading Co. When I heard the news, I felt that same gut punch I felt when I read Beaufort Performing Arts Center closed. We lost another front in the ongoing war between community and tourist fun park.

The bookstore had been there since 1979 -- less time than, say, Lipsitz Department store, which closed in February 2009, but much longer than the BPAC. Owner Lisa Estes told The Beaufort Gazette that the economy is to blame. In the worst of times, I don't know if we cling to our guns and religion, but, apparently, we don't cling to our independent bookstores. (Personally, I'd advise tightly holding all three.)

I will take the blame for this one. I have been in Bay Street several times since moving here in 2006, but I don't think I actually bought anything. I meant to. I wanted to. I just never did.

And I love books and bookstores. But I just never made a purchase. There was that one time that I almost got a book, but I didn't have cash, and I never went back. Like I said, I blame myself.

Now I'm feeling non-buyer's remorse. I look around my room at all of the things I bought at discount from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble, and I realize that I could have saved Bay Street for another day. Maybe two. We all can do more to support the local economy. Isn't that how recessions end? We bail it out one dollar at a time?

Of course, times are changing. Maybe this isn't an economy thing. Maybe this is a bookstore thing. I have done zero research, but I'm assuming independent bookstores that sell new books are dropping faster than they're opening. We'll all blink, and they'll join "record stores" and "soda shops" on the yesteryear nostalgia scrap heap.

How can Bay Street Trading compete? The world is changing. Forget Amazon or the chain bookstores, we don't even need paper. I can download a book to my phone in 20 seconds. (Let's all take a moment to pause, review that last sentence and appreciate how ridiculous any of those words would've been 10 years ago. We live in such an amazing time that if we were to travel five years in the future, we wouldn't even be able to communicate to the human/cyborg/iPod hybrid life forms that we'd encounter. Flying cars. Memory brain implants. Talking dogs. The Matrix. Anything is possible.)

I think the bigger problem, though, is that downtown Beaufort is changing. A bookstore is great for community members, but it's not so great for tourists to visit. Tourists don't buy books as souvenirs. They don't appreciate history (not like those who have lived it). Allegiance means less than a good bargain. Is it a coincidence on the same day Bay Street announced it was closing, the Gazette ran an article about local businesses praising how good the tourist season has been? Clearly, one doesn't equal success for the other.

There was a time when downtown was a neighborhood. Now it's a destination. Destinations need restaurants and ice cream parlors and stores that sell "My Parents Went to the Lowcountry and All They Got Me was This Lousy T-shirt" shirts. Neighborhoods need bookstores. Are we OK with that? Is that what we want? I'm not taking a side, I'm just asking the question: Do we want stores that sell items we need or stores we take our friends to when they visit and want a knickknack to put on their refrigerators? Do we want a local culture, or do we want to rent it out to anyone who pays the cover charge?

Me, well, I'd take both. Even though it seems as if "we've" made the decision, I'm not sure we had to. I love tourists. But I want them to appreciate what we offer; I don't want us offering what they appreciate. There is talk of rebranding the downtown campus, maybe offering more opportunities for students to live near University of South Carolina Beaufort. That's a start.

And who knows what tomorrow will bring. Maybe someone will do something crazy, such as convert some of those unused Bay Street second floors into leasable lofts. It has to happen sometime, right? If people actually lived downtown, I don't think the tourists would stay away. I think a vibrant, alive downtown would be even more attractive to visitors. We can have both. And, OK, maybe tourists still would not buy books. But they wouldn't have to.

Our future is whatever we want it to be. We just need to decide. Bay Street Trading Co. is an unfortunate casualty. But maybe losing a bookstore is exactly the call to action we need before we turn the final page.