UPPER WEST SIDE — Cardeology, the gift-and-card shop that made a home on the Upper West Side for nearly three decades, is closing its Amsterdam Avenue store this weekend.
Owner Richard Barbosa believes the scaffolding outside his store's Amsterdam Avenue location contributed to a drastic drop in sales which made staying open impossible, the West Side Rag reported.
The store will close for good on Sunday evening, Barbosa told DNAinfo Friday.
"I feel like I'm letting down the neighborhood, but what can I do?" he said. "Reality bites."
When Barbosa moved into his current 526 Amsterdam Ave. location at West 85th Street in 2013, up from his location three blocks south on the avenue, the landlord promised him the scaffolding would be gone within three months, he said.
But for years no work was done and the scaffolding remained, until this past December, when construction began and made it even harder for customers to see his store during the holiday rush, Barbosa explained.
The work stopped in January but resumed in February, coinciding with Valentine's Day, another busy time for the shop, he said.
In addition to the scaffolding, a black net went up covering the front of the store so that it's no longer visible from across the street, Barbosa said. The drop in sales was dramatic.
"We lost all the morning business," he said. "It's a struggle every month to make the rent."
And so, after 29 years, Barbosa closing the business he started at age 27, at a time when the neighborhood was a "ghost town" and he had to work a job waiting tables at night to afford to run the store in its early days.
At one point, in 1998, Cardeology had three locations — a store on Columbus Avenue at West 75th Street, another on Lexington Avenue and a third on Amsterdam Avenue at West 82nd Street, he said.
"I was on such a roll," Barbosa said.
In 2010, the store had to close its Columbus Avenue location after 12 years when he couldn't make rent payments. The rent at the store, which started at $10,000 a month, was listed as $22,860 at the time he closed.
When he closed his Columbus Avenue store, Barbosa told DNAinfo: "We try to give people an escape from New York... I always thought if people feel good, they'll stay and purchase something, so we try to create a nice atmosphere."
Other business owners around the city have complained about how much scaffolding hurts them, with one calling it "the kiss of death." Some store owners have tried to combat any issues caused by their stores' lack of visibility by hanging decorations on the scaffolding itself.
Barbosa is asking anyone who comes in for the 50 percent off sale that's running now through the store's closing Sunday evening to share their contact information "in case we resurface," he told customers Friday.
