It was a brisk and sunny Saturday in November, roughly a year from when Leigh Altshuler first opened the doors of her shop, Sweet Pickle Books, the newest (and only) used book and jarred pickle store on New York City’s Lower East Side. The party started at 11 a.m., and after five hours the anniversary celebration was still going strong. The block was buzzing, a crowded vintage clothing pop-up was doing its thing outside the store, and new merchandise—designed by Altshuler’s boyfriend, a graphic designer, who was tending the donation-based bar—decked the walls.
“So far, we’ve gone through two bottles of whiskey and I don’t know how many beers,” Altshuler said. “We’ve done a lot of picklebacks. Pickle jars we’ve gone through? We’re definitely pushing five or six right now.”
Altshuler is one of a number of booksellers to open up shop during the pandemic, though her store, to put it mildly, is unique. Housed in a long, narrow Orchard Street storefront crammed with used books and prominently displaying a large shelf filled with jarred pickles made from Altshuler’s own recipes, the shop intentionally evokes a Lower East Side now gone, where once, she said, more than 80 picklers used to ply their trade, supplying an entire metropolis’s delis and restaurants with their wares.
“I thought that the pickles would be a gimmick,” Altshuler said. “I started with 360 jars of pickles, and I made them myself. Now, the farm in Texas that I get the produce from makes them for me, and I’ve gone through more than 1,000 or 1,500 in the first year. People buy pickles all the time. I have customers who have never even bought a book.”
But books, not pickles, are Altshuler’s true passion. A veteran of the Strand Book Store’s marketing department, where she wore more than a few hats (“One time, when my boss walked in, I was sitting modeling a pair of socks while emailing, and someone on my team was taking a picture of my feet for the website,” she recalled), she had changed jobs just before the pandemic, to do marketing for the McKittrick Hotel and its site-specific theater production, Sleep No More. She was there for four months before all McKittrick employees lost their jobs. So Altshuler, who had just moved into a tiny apartment on the LES from Greenpoint, did the one thing she could think of to do now that she had all the time in the world: read.
After a few months filled with reading and a lot of mulling her options, Altshuler decided to open her own bookstore—used, because, as she put it, “I really felt that used books are so much of what makes New York really special. The books have their own stories.” And with other used booksellers (which were not considered essential businesses at the time) closed during lockdown, there were lots of books available for those willing to brave the waves of Covid and go out looking.
“I drove around in my car and I picked up books from people,” Altshuler said. “Salvation Army wasn’t taking anything, Housing Works wasn’t taking anything, but I was. So at a time when everybody was staying in their house not doing anything, I was going into strangers’ homes, and having these intimate moments with them, because books are so personal. I was packing up people’s bookshelves and they were telling me about, like, when they got to New York. This one woman had lived here for 58 years, on Park Avenue in a beautiful apartment, and she was getting ready to move with her dog to a one-bedroom in San Diego on the beach. All of these people I met made me feel like I couldn’t be in more of the right place at the right time.”
That didn’t mean there weren’t challenges. “It was hard work,” Altshuler said. “Books are heavy. Walk-ups suck. My car is only so big, and parking tickets suck. New York makes it really hard to do this kind of work. I didn’t know that. But I still knew it would be worth it. I built out the store from September to November, in six weeks, every day just moving boxes, shelving, pricing all the books, getting liability insurance—figuring out how to do everything. I did this all with my savings. When I finally told my parents, they were like, ‘What are you thinking? Do you always just have to be the craziest person?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah!’ ”
Still, the effort paid off. The business has been successful, and Altshuler even hired a few part-time employees over the course of the year. Now, she’s preparing to do more to “serve the neighborhood, and I don’t think selling books and pickles is the only way that Sweet Pickle can do that.” For her, that means stocking zines produced in the LES, hosting pop-ups, and generally helping others on the LES “figure out how to do the thing they want to do,” just like she did.
“It feels really weird to see somebody carrying my tote bag on the street, or wearing a Sweet Pickle hat,” she said. “And it feels weird to ship things to Finland or Mexico—really to ship things in general, because I’m like, How do you even know what this is? But it feels really great. All of the people that I’ve met—customers, the other business owners in the neighborhood, other bookstore people—have been really wonderful. It’s been really hard, for sure. I did a lot of manual labor. But it’s been really wonderful. At first, I was like, oh, I wish I did this sooner. But I also don’t, because it was the perfect time to do it.”
