NCC’S short-sightedness

Re: Nine months later, former Nicholas Hoare location on Sussex still vacant, Jan. 26.

Regarding the article about the National Capital Commission’s indoor vacant lot where one of the city’s best bookstores used to stand, the more I read about the screwing over — there are no other words for it — administered to this business by the NCC, the angrier I get.

Nicholas Hoare Books in that location was effectively an ambassador both for our region’s history and our nation’s authors in a zone that is packed with visitors from all over the world pretty much all year round. The store routinely featured subjects of local interest and Canadian authors prominently in its window displays. Once inside, a bookstore-phile would find amid the buttery warmth of hardwood floors shelves on which high-quality, eclectic books were displayed with the full covers visible, not just endless lines of book spines.

My wife and I always visit and shop at the Toronto Front Street Nicholas Hoare bookstore, and make the time to have a lunch at one or another of several perfectly good nearby restaurants or cafés.

The NCC’s incredible short-sightedness in making it untenable for a longtime visitor magnet to continue operating in a very popular part of the city is a perfect bureaucratic example of a perfectly bureaucratic organization’s reaping what it sowed. Anything for a buck. Well don’t spend it all in one place, NCC.

MICHAEL J. DICOLA, Ottawa