Saying Goodbye to the March Hare

There is a lot of transition happening in my world right now, but the thing I have to tell you about first, because I don’t want anyone to show up in February and be surprised, is the closing of the March Hare, our tiny toy shop in the East Village. And when I say closing, I am talking purely about the physical location. What we decide to do with it next (maybe it just exists online? maybe we do a pop-up for the holidays? maybe we open in a new location?) is still up for debate.

I knew this day would come eventually (I was anticipating some time in the spring), but as it turns out, our last day in this location will be January 31st. That’s because we decided to go month to month until the landlord found new tenants and he happened to find them rather quickly, which is a testament to how much different this block feels than when we first took over the March Hare a little over two and half years ago, in an effort to keep our neighborhood from having another small business with a closing sign on the door and cardboard covering the windows. The eagerness of the new tenants symbolizes to me that the March Hare has served its purpose, we fulfilled our promise to keep it going for the good of the community, and it has all come to its natural end.

All this is to say, I know this sounds like sad news, and it will be sad for us to say goodbye to the shop, but it is the right thing for us to do. For our community, for ourselves and for my followers too. Let me explain.

When we bought the shop in April of 2022, we did it for three reasons. The first, and most pressing, was to help out the previous owners who were a young married couple (Jason and Karen) facing a health scare. They needed consistent capital to pay for their medical bills, which the toy shop did not provide. Selling the shop to us did just that. Plus we let them phase out their inventory while still collecting income, helped fundraise for them through my online platform, and were happy to have them stay involved through part time work for a paycheck. Since then, Karen’s health has vastly improved and she is doing great. Jason now has a full time job and has moved on. Everyone is happy and healthy.

Another reason we decided to buy the shop was because we were in the process of moving to Tribeca from the East Village (where I had lived for almost 20 years) and we weren’t quite ready to let go of our old neighborhood. The March Hare is literally around the corner from our old apartment, mere steps from the bus stop you saw me take my kids to school from every morning for years. Right down the street from both our favorite coffee shop (Mud) and our favorite ice cream shop (Davey’s), two other small businesses we couldn’t imagine living without. Well, now we have been in Tribeca for three years and we have really grown to love it here. We have friends in the ‘hood and new neighborhood spots we frequent and earlier this month, we moved into an apartment that truly feels like home. (More on that soon!) Our life in the East Village has started to feel farther and farther away and I don’t feel as much of a need to hang on to a piece of it as I did when we first bought the March Hare. A few months ago (after three years of Mike making special trips to the East Village to get his favorite coffee), we noticed that a small food kiosk in Tribeca started serving Mud coffee. It felt like a sign. As for Davey’s, they have been doing fantastic and now have three locations- one in the East Village, one in Greenpoint and a new space in the Moynihan Train Hall, if anyone needs an ice cream fix on their way in and out of Amtrak, NJ Transit, or the LIRR.

The third reason, which was probably the biggest, and the one I mentioned in my intro, was our desire to do something good for our community. It was post pandemic and it felt like our city was falling apart. Families we knew were leaving left and right, mom and pop shops were closing at an alarming rate with nothing taking their place, and personally, we were feeling pretty isolated, as a lot of people were at that time. It was a time when we were rethinking our priorities and eager to make positive changes. It was in this time that my sister, my mom, my dad, and Lucy and her family all separately decided to leave New York. It was when Harlow switched schools and I realized my time was almost up in the K-8 school community I had existed in since Mazzy was in kindergarten. As for my friend Karen, co-owner of the business (a different Karen than the previous owner), her only child was graduating 8th grade and after years of being a stay-at-home mom, she was also looking for a next chapter. The idea of owning a toy shop together on our favorite block felt like a way to do something joyful, collaborative and productive. It was a way to firmly plant our feet in NYC and not only say we were staying, but that we were actively trying to revive it. It was a way to get out of our apartments (like many, I had switched from working in an office to working from home since the pandemic), team up with our friends, interact with fellow New Yorkers we wouldn’t normally meet and keep the lights on in what felt like an important part of what made living in NYC so special— the small, quirky neighborhood shops that defy all logical business models.

Everyone said that buying the March Hare was a bad business decision, but we countered that it wasn’t about the money. It was about the community. And that’s how I elicited support from you all— buying something from the shop was not just a way to support me, it was a way to help keep small businesses alive in Manhattan. But then, something pretty wonderful happened over the course of these last few years— new shops started to open all around us on East 9th Street. In addition to Mud (which has been there forever), Pillow Cat Books (which opened around the same time we took over the shop) and Davey’s (which closed and then re-opened a few doors down), there is now Rosemary’s vintage housewares, the gnocchi place that went viral, and Te Company which sells the most perfect little pastries to pair with your cup of tea, just to name a few. East 9th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue is now a thriving block full of unique independent small businesses, so asking for support to help the March Hare stay open “for the good of the community” started to feel a bit disingenuous. The March Hare was just like any other business— it needed sales for our bottom line, which never did more than break even.

Plus, there was another issue. There is a children’s store called Anme across the street which mainly sells clothing and accessories but over the years, has started selling more and more toys, including Sonny Angels which occasionally cause lines around the block. Whenever we found new items that we would have liked to carry in the March Hare, it turned out that Anme already carried them, which meant that the March Hare could not. There are rules among retailers that prevent items from being sold by multiple shops within a certain radius. This is no slight to them. They were simply very on top of the toy retail space because I imagine, this is their passion and their main business, as opposed to a side project. Certainly, our intention was never to try to compete with another toy shop on the same block and impact their profits.

And so, I think more recently, as we began to focus more on the financials of the shop, it all became a little less fun. At the end of this year, after looking at our profits vs losses, we decided to go to the landlord and suggest we go month to month until they found someone new to take over the space. We would have stayed as long as necessary, as we did not want to leave a storefront empty, but the landlord happened to find someone almost immediately who was interested in building out the shop to fit their purposes. It’s an Irish owner selling products from Ireland, which feels kind of perfect because Jason and Karen are also Irish and the name “The March Hare” was a reference to Jason’s childhood in Ireland. Here’s a direct quote from him when he originally opened the shop:

“We called our shop ‘The March Hare’ for two reasons. When I was a wee boy, I would watch the fighting hares in the fields outside of my grandparents home in Donegal, and my grandad would tell me they are the mad March hares, just like me! The second reason was simply the idea that [by opening a toy shop in NYC], we were headed down a rabbit hole and into the unknown.”

Well, here we are, at the end of the rabbit hole. We feel like we succeeded in doing something good for the community, the community is now thriving (with or without us) and we are ready to move on. Into the Unknown!!!! That’s a Frozen joke. I’ll be in Tribeca.

PS: I just want to give a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has supported the shop, whether that’s by visiting in person or purchasing something online. I appreciate everyone who bought a holiday box or a sweatshirt and I hope doing so brought you joy. I hope that purchase will continue to bring you joy even after the physical shop is gone. I know I will continue to wear my March Hare merch proudly. No matter what we decide to do with the business, the shop will always represent a fun detour in our lives where we did something heartfelt and unexpected. I also love that I got to meet so many of you throughout my time at the shop. If I had to guess, I would say about 40% of the people who came into the March Hare did so because they follow me online. There were many local residents, but I think more often, they were tourists. It is the greatest honor of my life that you all would travel to some place as big and amazing as New York City and make time for my little piece of Manhattan. I cannot even begin to show my gratitude for that amount of kindness.

I have always said that buying the shop was for the community. I meant NYC. But you guys showed me that my real community is so much broader than my neighborhood. We come from all over the world. I love you all. Thank you for supporting me through this chapter.

PPS: All our remaining merchandise is still available online at themarchharenyc.com. We would love to sell as much of it as possible before the shop closes.