What Is Happening at Bluestockings?

On Monday, after 26 years in operation, Bluestockings Cooperative, New York City's famed radical bookstore, permanently closed the doors of its Lower East Side store. The announcement came via a post on the store's Instagram account. "This was our absolute last resort," read the statement, before chalking the closure up to financial woes (an unaffordable $12,000 in monthly rent and a debt to book distributors that, as of April, totaled $100,000) and a somewhat vague reference to "shared failures of multiple cohorts to come to consensus around guiding principles and practices Bluestockings should embody to move forward as a worker-owner cooperative." 

But by Tuesday evening, a very different post appeared, and then later disappeared, on the same Instagram account. 

It read: "A message from the exclusively brown POC stewards fired from BSTOX yesterday: We, the melanated stewards who've been holding the space down all this time…we, two of the workers, did not post the statement y'all are sharing." Muddying the waters even further, the post implied Bluestockings would continue operating, and invited interested parties to a press conference outside the bookstore on Thursday to "answer questions, talk with community, and relay next steps."

That second post was by Jay Gandhi, 35, and Dheivanai Moorthy, 25, who'd been working at the store for most of 2025. In comments under the post announcing Bluestockings's closure, they both asserted that they'd been unjustly fired. "the white folks on the lease who are former worker owners made this decision without consulting any of us," Moorthy wrote, referring to co-owners Merlin Sabal, 31, and Raquel Espasande, 28. "hold the white folks attempting to act like this was a collective process accountable. this is false and white violence."