Big box bookseller Barnes & Noble will close its last bookstore not on a college campus in D.C. come winter, when it shutters its store on 12th Street NW.
The 32,000-square-foot store follows the closures of several other large bookstores in the District in recent years: Barnes & Noble’s Georgetown store closed in 2011, and two large locations of Borders in downtown D.C. also closed that year after Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) still has college locations at Catholic University in Northeast D.C. and at Howard University in Shaw. It also recently announced that it will open a rare new location, this one at the One Loudoun retail development in Ashburn.
The closure also leaves the retail space at 555 12th St. NW largely vacant as its owners, MetLife Inc. and Norges Bank Investment Management work to reposition the building. The building’s main office tenant, law firm Arnold & Porter LP, has moved out; the property has about 100,000 square feet of retail altogether, including the long-shuttered, 40,000-square-foot ESPN Zone space.
“We are in active discussions with a couple of tenants that we’re very excited about from the standpoint of retail,” said Dave Dochter of Dochter & Alexander Retail Advisors, the brokerage marketing the retail space.
Dochter confirmed that Barnes & Noble will be leaving by the end of the year, which was first reported by Washington City Paper. The bookseller had been on a month-to-month lease “for some time,” Dochter added.
“The Washington D.C. community is extremely important to us,” David Deason, vice president for Barnes & Noble Development, said in an emailed statement. “We are looking at replacement locations and hope to have a new store there in the near future.”
If the company is looking for similarly sized space, it could be a tough hunt in downtown D.C., where many similar spaces have been snapped up by discount retailers of late. The former Borders at 18 and L streets NW is now a Nordstrom Rack, and the former Borders at 14th and F streets NW became The Hamilton, a restaurant and live music venue.
There should be a big space opening up in the heart of Chinatown, with the International Spy Museum vacating its space at Eighth and G streets NW in favor of a new home at L’Enfant Plaza, but that buildout will take a couple of years. The museum had 20,000 square feet of exhibit space as well as other ancillary space.
Nearby, a space on three levels also just became available at 575 Seventh St. NW with the departure of the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, which closed Sept. 30. A listing for the property lists the retail space as totaling 29,000 square feet.
As for 555 12th Street, the owners aren’t talking about who they’re trying to bring into the space. At one point, there was a Dave & Busters looking at the old ESPN Zone, and Target was also reportedly looking at the building back in 2013.
Dochter also told us last year about how he envisioned connecting new retail tenants at the building to the fashion retail further north on 11th Street, all the way up to CityCenterDC, which is on H Street NW between 11th and Ninth streets NW.
