While many girls at my Bronx middle school played hooky to spend time with their crushes, I cut class to lollygag at our local Barnes & Noble. After purchasing Mocha Frappuccinos at the in-store Starbucks, my best friend and I would bee-line to our favorite sections—YA romance for her, urban fiction for me. I'd keep the raunchy titles wrapped in B&N’s dark plastic bag in my backpack to get past my parents, smuggling the book into school to read between class periods.
Back then, I didn't fully understand why urban fiction resonated with me so much. Now I know it’s because it was the first time I found characters that looked and talked like me in these books. No, I didn’t marry a drug dealer, but novels like Sista Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever and Teri Woods’ True to the Game series told the raw, unapologetic stories of women navigating street life—death, poverty, violence, romance, etc.—topics that were far more exciting and relatable than the required readings and plays that were central to my English curriculum. The erotic plot lines allowed my friends and I to have our own “birds and bees” conversations—we were grown and nobody could tell us otherwise.
True to the Game
I eventually graduated to buying my college books (and toilet paper, and skincare goodies, and literally everything else) through my student Amazon Prime subscription. Hanging out in Barnes & Noble became something of my past, because, honestly, who even had the time to read for pleasure between meeting deadlines and maintaining a social life? Then, in 2017, my middle school hangout—the borough's only general interest bookstore—closed and became a Saks Off Fifth.
When Noelle Santos, an Afro-Latina native of the Bronx’s Soundview neighborhood who worked in human resources on Wall Street, saw an unsuccessful petition to save the book store, she was outraged.“I signed it, I shared it, and still didn’t feel any better,” she tells ELLE.com. Growing up in the South Bronx, the Barnes & Noble had hardly been accessible to her anyway. “There was only one bookstore and I didn't have access to it until I was 23 and got my driver's license. So I literally decided, the week I saw the petition, that I was gonna open an independent bookstore.”
Today, Santos is the owner of The Lit Bar, the Bronx's only independent bookstore, which doubles as a wine bar. On a recent Friday afternoon, Santos greeted me outside , wearing a New York Yankees fitted over a perfectly blown-out bob. I approached the quaint, sun-lit building where I was met by a sign that read “The Lit Bar” and the cheeky double entendre “Bookstore and Chill” before Santos welcomed me with a bright grin and hug.
Located in The Bronx’s Mott Haven area, the Lit Bar is stocked with every type of book one’s heart can desire, from Michelle Obama’s Becoming to instant classics like The Alchemist and A Tale of Two Cities. At The Lit Bar, urban fiction novels were no longer relegated to just one section in the bookstore; The Coldest Winter Ever rubbed spines with Esmeralda Santiago's coming-of-age memoirs and Shakespeare's most beloved plays. The books are divided into unconventional category names like “The Marathon Continues,” a collection of books the late rapper Nipsey Hussle recommended over the years, “'Cause This Is Thriller”—mystery and thriller novels—and “Dear White People,” a Santos-curated “reading list for white people,” she says. “I'm willing to have the patience to have these discussions with you about my hair and my culture and all that. But as a individual and black citizen, it's not my responsibility to educate you on that shit.”
Here, we talk more about her journey to opening up The Lit Bar, handling gentrification criticism, and the Sarah Jessica Parker effect.
What was the first book you fell in love with?
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. It’s a coming of age story about a little girl, Francie Nolan, set in the 1920s in Brooklyn. I was about 12 and my mother gave it to me as a form of punishment. I was always a reader before that, but like, that was the book that did it for me and that was my first time seeing myself in a character. She was like, "Here! You need to be more grateful for your life.” So she gave me that book, the big, fat, 700 page corporal punishment thing, and I ended up loving the book, so, joke's on her. And then from there I jumped right into urban fiction, and I went crazy. I got my books from my parents, and then once I started working around 14, 15 years old, then I would buy my books from the little vendors on the streets like on 125th. There used to be an indie author named Relentless Aaron. He used to park his car underneath the train station in Parkchester, and I used to catch him, like, every other weekend, get whatever he wrote.
How did The Lit Bar become a reality?
So I went on Google and literally typed in “how to open a bookstore.” Then, as I was reading up on the outlook of the industry, I didn't like what I saw. You know, I learned about the competition from Amazon, from E-Books, and, you know, the profit margins on print books didn't look too hot. I thought well, what am I going to do to compete somewhere other than price? I need to create an experience. So that's how the whole wine bar idea came into play. Wine bar, café, creating just a social space rather than just a place to come pick books up off of the shelves and go. Independent bookstores are powerful without wine bars, but I need to be able to react to market changes. I wanted this to be a social space, and what better way for people to connect than through books, food and wine?
The original name that I wanted to call the store was Book Bar and Googled it to see if it was available, and it existed in Denver, Colorado. So I called the bookstore in Denver, and introduced myself to the lady who answered the phone, which was also the owner, Nicole Sullivan, and said, "Hey, I'm Noelle, I like what you're doing, I want to do it. Will you help me?" She’s been my mentor ever since.
So how did you collect enough money to get this idea off the ground?
I'm financially independent. I had opportunities to partner with developers, and have investors in the business. But I didn't go that route. I entered City Foundations New York startup business plan competition in 2016. I ended up beating out 358 other New York City startups and I took that money, I won $7,500, to buy pop-up shop supplies—the crates and the tables and my first stack of books. Even some of the places I had volunteered at donated books to my inventory. I started out at the Bronx Museum of the Arts for two days. From there, I went just about anywhere I could put a six foot table and started collecting email addresses and asking the community what they wanted to see, what types of books would sell, and continuing to run my book club.
So by year three, I had this award winning business plan that I have to bring into fruition. I needed, according to my business plan, the research, the calls that I made, I needed $40,000 to qualify for the kind of loan that I was gonna need to do this. Even though I placed high in the competition, the judges told me, "You're never gonna raise $40,000." So I was like okay, bet. I launched a IndieGoGo campaign, called Let's Bring a Goddamn Bookstore To The Bronx. I rapped my pitch in the video using hip hop references and little silly jokes that showed my personality because not only are we fighting for a bookstore, but I wanted people to see that we can have a seat at the table and maintain our identities. I was working in the corporate world, and I climbed the ladder so far because I was code switching all that time. This time around, I wanted to come dressed like me— hoodie, jeans and my hoop earrings.
You mentioned you used to measure your success by how far you can get away from the Bronx, but you decided to set up shop here. Why The Bronx as opposed to other areas?
With The Lit Bar, I wanted to help change the narrative of how people from outside look at us in the borough and trying to undo all the the years of messages that we've internalized as a community that we're not worthy of this or that. Some people think a book and wine bar is “so white,” that’s a response I've gotten several times. But education, access to literature, intellectual visibility, that's not reserved for white people, and I want to help get that message across. We have a lot of generational trauma to undo, and this is the start of it. The Lit Bar.
How does The Lit Bar help build a sense of community?
It takes a community to not only to build this place, but just keep me going. I'll donate books to this local girl's group, it's like a mentorship program where they’ll come in we’ll do book giveaways and events and then they just ended up hanging out with me. When I was in construction hell for months, they would come in and help me clean the store Rosa at Mott Haven Bar, which is black-owned taught me about restaurant appliances. At one point, lawyers were trying to charge me $6,000 to do my liquor license application and Rosa sat down with me, pulled out her liquor license, and we did my application page by page by page—no attorney, nothing and I got my license. So. I'm telling you, we have the power in our own communities. We all have our individual talents but we have the power to put together our dollars and our resources, our education, our knowledge, our experiences, to make things great. We don't have to be in competition with each other.
Have you had any angry residents address you about The Lit Bar possibly raising the rent in the area?
I take a lot of heat from people who are upset that, you know, The Lit. Bar is helping to spur gentrification. Which, in fact, it does. It's true. People who aren’t from here want to live upstairs from this bookstore, and because of that landlords are able to charge a lot more. That is reality. But what I try to explain is that gentrification happened way before the bookstore moves in. This is a national epidemic. But what are we gonna do to have a seat at the table to create change? What are we gonna do to give our community the resources for to participate, and not just be at the victim of whatever comes here from people who don't have our culture and our interests at heart?
Have “Bodega Boys” Desus and Mero had a chance to stop by?
No, but I remember seeing Desus around here once and he was like, "Yo, you’re Noelle Santos!" And I'm like... He's like, "Yo, I love what you're doing." And I'm like, "Yo, that's Desus!" I go to follow him and I see he's already following me, which is crazy because we’re fans of each other. He hasn't been in the store yet, but we connect on social media and engage all the time. But I'm about to hit him to do this story time for the kids.
You have a lot of celebrity fans, including Marc Lamont Hill and Sarah Jessica Parker. How did The Lit Bar land on SJP’s radar?
One day before the opening, the media was being really disrespectful so my team was instructed not to accept any interviews for the entire day. Then the phone rang and one of my booksellers answered the phone, and it was Sarah Jessica Parker on the line. So Ashley, my bookseller, didn’t want to disturb me but didn’t know what to do, so she put on speaker. Sarah Jessica Parker says, "This is Sarah Jessica Parker. I swear I'm the real person." So I answered the phone and SJP says, "Yeah, I just wanted to congratulate you on the opening of the store myself, and I'm going to come visit, and I wanted to ask your permission first before I steal one of your pictures off of your Instagram to share it to my community." And I'm just, like, freaking out. She promised to send a box of her favorite titles like The Old Drift because I believe she has an imprint with Penguin Random House where she helps to highlight marginalized voices through her platform. S posted The Lit Bar on her Instagram and we got a lot of interest from her followers. Plus, she sent us the books, we sold that... So now all that’s left is for her to come by the bookstore.
