The Keeper of New York City's Last Real Chess Shop

When Imad Khachan saw the L-shaped Greenwich Village storefront in the fall of 1995, the NYU graduate student took it as a sign that renting it was his next move. The space mirrored how a knight, the board's only wayward traveler, moves on a chess board: two squares in one direction and one to the side.

For Khachan, the son of Palestinian refugees who discovered chess as a child growing up in war-ravaged Lebanon, his own journey had felt more like that of a pawn. Plus, he had just been locked out of the chess shop where he'd worked for six years, and which just happened to be located across the street from that empty storefront; the owner had told him to "get lost" when Khachan asked for his promised stake in the business. Here was his chance to wrest something that felt like control over his life.

Khachan, who had decided he was done with academia, opened his own store, Chess Forum, in that L-shaped space, triggering what locals dubbed the "Civil War on Thompson Street." 

Thirty years later, Chess Forum—which has outlived all its rivals—is still at 219 Thompson Street, and Khachan, who turned 60 in August, is still at its helm.