This was a great place. Sad to see it go. It is rare to find any store where every item seems to be there just for you- in this case the items are books and they are there for me because they are about every facet of architecture. I mean "were" there for me. The great Prairie Avenue Bookstore has met its demise.
The last time I was there a couple of years ago, I picked up a copy of the "New York Five" for $7.95 or so. Where else are you gonna find that? I also found some great out-of-print Phaidon "Architecture 3" books that I had been trying to find for years. My last purchases from Prairie Avenue were done from my office, on-line, the drawback being that their website could never achieve the feeling of being in the actual store, and didn't seem to try.
I was thinking about Prarie Avenue a couple of weeks ago when I was in a Barnes and Noble which had pretty much done away with their architecture "department" except for a few Frank Lloyd Wright books, maybe a copy of "The Not So Big House" and the "Field Guide to American Architecture". That's what was great about Prarie Avenue: they had those marketable books, but they also had books that were far from mainstream (which tend to be the ones I would most likely buy). RIP, and Amazon.com it is, I guess.
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