Midnight Special Closes Chapter

By Erica Williams
Staff Writer

Feb. 28 -- A large black-hawk helicopter hovers over hundreds of toy soldiers scattered around army tanks, as an oil derrick rises above Barbie's dream house and a soldier steps over a hungry baby.

It has been two days since Midnight Special shut down to begin its move into an uncertain future, but the bookstore's last political salvo continues to beckon passersby on the Third Street Promenade on this cold gray Tuesday afternoon. Many stop, some in confusion, some with a knowing look, and stare.

"We wanted to incite people, to urge them to action, through education, to be a voice, a loud one," said owner Margie Ghiz, who said she would leave the antiwar display up for the landlords to take down. "It was to reach people on the Promenade with other ideas."

In a country dominated by media conglomerates that push a single world view, Midnight Special's politically-charged, counter culture window displays provided an alternative message for some of the 10 million annual visitors who stroll down the Promenade, Ghiz said.

Many stopped and didn't come in, she said, but they stopped and looked and read.

"The move is gonna hurt that," Ghiz said. "It's gonna be tough to reach people now with ideas that are rare, ideas that shouldn't be rare." One customer, she added, wrote on the bookstore's Web site that the point of Midnight Special was "to be in your face," and that pretty much sums it up.

After ten years at its current location and nearly two decades on Third Street, the independent bookstore last week vacated the towering space lined with books, succumbing to market forces that have driven so many independents off the Promenade. With no place to go for now, the contents of the store will be put in storage until a new home can be found.

A small handwritten sign by the door reads "We Shall Rise Again" and directs readers to Midnight Special's Web site for updates on the future of the bookstore, which opened in Venice 33 years ago and has been kept afloat by more than 100,000 hours of donated labor.

"This was the only store that carried books I cared about," said Emanuel Tet, a passerby from Glendale. The Romanian émigré said an American friend introduced him to the store 18 years ago when he was looking for a hard-to-find book by French philosopher Emil Sioran. He found it at Midnight Special and has been coming back to the store ever since.

Inside the shuttered store, scores of olive green bookshelves lay empty and dusty in the 5,000-square-foot space. The only visitors here today are professional movers, interspersed among the store's 14 employees, most uncertain about their futures, and dozens of volunteers feverishly pulling books from the shelves.

"I'm angry that the economic situation is such that this has to happen," said Lorraine Suzuki, an employee who has worked at the store on and off since 1985. Suzuki, who assisted Ghiz in the store's move to its current location, now heads up this move, managing more than 80 volunteers in this effort.

Though the situation looks dire, Suzuki said, "I am confident that Margie can pull something out of the hat. I believe in her and her ability to make something happen."

Amid the steady whirr of drills methodically dismantling shelving and the sound of tape ripping around boxes, Ghiz is nowhere to be found.

She later admits she couldn't bear to step into the nearly empty store. Instead Ghiz stays in a tiny, crowded closet-like space that serves as her office at the back of the store. There is no real room for guests.

Ghiz busies herself cleaning out files. She'd cried all day the day before, she said, and had only gotten in the way trying to help. Today, she is in a reflective mood.

"I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, we did this. We pulled it off,'" she said. "I'm just so proud of us."

Ghiz has just unearthed some old correspondence with Wally Marks Jr., the store's longtime benefactor. Marks Jr.'s vision for the counterculture retail icon as an intellectual hub -- a marketplace for ideas outside of the mainstream -- spurred him and his family to underwrite the store's move and substantially subsidize its tenure at its current location over the last decade.

"Without him we never would have done this," Ghiz said. "He said, 'Yes you can,' and we did."

Ghiz, who once had trouble envisioning Midnight Special as a cultural Mecca, now cannot imagine it as anything less. A new home, she said, must accommodate the store's diverse clientele and numerous events and programs -- an average of 25 monthly, 11 of them part of ongoing series, she said.

Groups that call Midnight Special home include Science in the Public Interest, 6 years; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting; 7 years; the poetry workshop, 10 years, and the Sisterhood book group that survived that store's demise, 3 years. A group of computer enthusiasts also has hosted a monthly Linux operating system "install fest" at the store for 5 years.

"To have a store like this," Ghiz sighed, "you know it matters. It isn't to tell people what to do," she said, "it's to get them thinking, to get them to ask questions.'

"If you don't question, you settle for less, you get victimized," she added, citing a likely war with Iraq. The recent antiwar demonstrations by millions around the world were inspiring, Ghiz said. "I have to keep going because I want to be a part of that," she said.

But persevering has so far proven difficult. Ghiz still has not found a home for the store. Its books and furnishings will now be temporarily housed at a storage facility in North Long Beach, as Ghiz tries to find office space and goes about the tough job of finding a new home.

About eight tractor-trailer loads will complete the store's move Friday, said Bob Ensign, a relocation specialist with the company managing the move.

Ghiz said her search has been frustrated by landlords who can afford to keep their buildings empty. Most commercial landlords are major corporations with no incentive to rent to anyone other than the highest bidder, she said, since they can write off their losses on vacant property on their tax returns.

She pointed to retail clothing giant Levi Straus' imminent move to the Promenade on a reported $45,000 monthly lease.

"How could anybody that has a normal store compete with that?" she asked.

Volunteers there to help out with the move agreed. Norma Vega, a modern languages professor at Santa Monica College and Loyola Marymount University decried what she called "the corporate takeover of the Third Street Promenade," as did Eugene Cornelius, a retiree.

Both were putting in long hours Tuesday. Vega, a Culver City resident, said she was donating about five hours, Cornelius of Pacific Palisades, about eight.

"I feel uneasy," said Vega of putting the books in storage. She said she feared Midnight Special might not be able to afford to come back to the area. If so, that would prove a significant loss to the Westside, she said. "If they had something secured I'd feel better."

"It's really sad," echoed Suzuki, the volunteer coordinator, "because we don't know where we're going. It seems like such a waste."

Suzuki, an unemployed graphic artist into her third stint at Midnight Special, is concerned about finding work. She wasn't quite sure she'd be back once the store found a new home. Having fallen into the ranks of the long-term unemployed, she had come back to the store because she'd been unable to find work in her field.

Store manager Ruben Perez is positive he will return when the store reopens. In the meantime, he plans to look for other work to fill the gap. Perez sighed and his eyes moistened when he contemplated what the store means to him.

"We grew up here," Perez said of himself and other staffers. He was a student at Santa Monica High when he began work at Midnight Special almost 10 years ago. "Anything I didn't learn in school, I learned here," he said.

Perez, like Suzuki, is optimistic about the store's survival. "It's a chance to recreate ourselves," he said of the present situation. "We can do it. We can beat the odds."

Ghiz said she is working to find interim jobs for all of her staff, and anticipates many of them will return when the store reopens. She also plans to continue their health insurance coverage for the next three months.

Midnight Special's next home must be in an area that people, no matter their socioeconomic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, or other distinguishing factor, feel comfortable going to, Ghiz said. As a result, she's concentrating her search in the Santa Monica and Hollywood, cities, she said, that typically welcome all.