Harbor Books Looking For New Home On Sag Harbor Main Street

The rent’s too high for the owners of Harbor Books in Sag Harbor, and it’s forced them to look for a new home next year.

The owners of the popular bookstore at 20 Main Street posted a note in the store’s front window recently announcing that it will no longer be at its longtime home as of February 2019. Signed by founder and owner Taylor Rose Berry, the note cited a rent increase schedule for the store’s next lease term as the main reason for the change in location.

Harbor Books has been at 20 Main Street since it first opened in November 2014, and while she wouldn’t say how much the rent increase as of the end of February was, Ms. Berry said on Monday that it “simply would be too much.”

Ms. Berry said that business has been “well” on a consistent basis, particularly during the summer and the holiday season. Her concern is the high rent not only for her own store but for other small businesses that may not be able to afford spaces on Main Street.

“The rents out in the East End of Long Island are fairly high,” Ms. Berry said. “This isn’t an unexpected increase. I knew that this was coming.”

Harbor Books contains a wide variety of literature for customers ranging from fiction and biographies to graphic novels, cookbooks and books for children.

The shop also offers a relaxed environment, with a wood floor, warm colors in the decoration, splashes of portraits and art, and leather easy chairs peppered throughout the store for customers to sit and read. The most recent addition to the store is a small kiosk serving Dobrá Tea, a company started in Czechoslovakia but which opened its first U.S. store in 2003 in Burlington, Vermont.

Ms. Berry first discovered Dobrá while attending the University of Vermont.

“When we opened the store, I knew I wanted to have some sort of café element,” Ms. Berry said. “Sag Harbor happens to have about eight or nine places to get coffee, but in all of Long Island, there’s not a traditional tea shop. It made sense to do tea—nothing goes together better than tea and books, in my opinion.”

While she’s looking to move out of the current location, Ms. Berry said that she hopes to find another open space on Main Street. She added that she’s aware of “quite a few” vacant areas to move the store into, and the decision will come down to whether a potential space has the “elements” needed to run the store. While she acknowledged that Harbor Books could also move somewhere off Main Street, Ms. Berry said it was “essential” to have the store in the heart of Sag Harbor.

“So much of our business is people discovering the bookstore, especially people who aren’t locals that don’t know,” she said. “There’s something beautiful coming into a small town like Sag Harbor and that there’s a bookstore, a movie theater, a theater and all of these other stores you get to discover.

“I’ve been really lucky to be part of a community that has such a wonderful literary spirit,” she added. “Sag Harbor as a village has a really wonderful soul—it’s such an artistic community. There used to be six bookstores in Sag Harbor, and when we opened, Canio’s was the last one there. I think that’s a shame that there would only be one for such a literary community.”