Notes from the Field: Keeping the Faith

By Cheryl Katz

Don’t wait. Catch a plane, hop a train, or grab a book on tape (Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her, my particular favorite) and jump in the car. If all goes according to plan, within four hours of leaving Boston you will be in New York at the just-opened-less-than-a-month-ago Dover Street Market at the corner of 30^th and Lex. The brainchild of Rei Kawakubo, this American outpost of her “department store” will restore your faith in the glories of brick and mortar.

Photos by Jeffrey Katz

Not so long ago, when some of my most beloved shops went south, replaced by “me too” behemoths, I took to my laptop when the urge to shop struck. As much as I had kicked and screamed and professed, “Never!”, I  eventually embraced the enemy, clicking my way around the internet in search of whatever it was that I thought I needed or wanted.

Sure, I still longed for the high that only an old-school store could provide—the displays, the space, actually touching the stuff—but I made my peace with the technological shopping frontier.

Until last week, that is, when an impromptu visit to the aforementioned Dover Street Market made me a believer again.