Tale of Two Businesses at 651 E. Park Ave.

If not for a fire, doctor-patient relationship and Amazon.com, optometrist Dr. Leland Barry might not have opened his office in the East End.

A self-described “big reader,” Barry was a regular at Lazy Days, the second-hand bookstore that once occupied 651 E. Park Ave., where he opened his second store in Long Beach in May 2010.

The year before, Mitch Schab, owner of Lazy Days and one of Barry’s patients, closed his store, the latest casualty among independent booksellers that once peppered the South Shore. It also supplied used records, VHS movies, antiques and framed artwork, and just as record-and-CD stores have been done in by iTunes, bookstores have been undercut by the likes of Amazon.com.

Schab opened his store in 2002 and admittedly knew even then what he was getting into as online bookstores were burgeoning. As the years passed, fewer of his customers came in to browse and schools ceased coming in with reading lists. He said his bottom line was hurt by losing half of his special-order business to Amazon.com and eBay.

“You do it because you love books,” Schab said in the days leading up to closing his store.  

Barry opened his first office in 1985 at 58 W. Park Ave., the site of a former optical store, and in 2004 he opened a second store on East Park Avenue, opposite the movie theater, but it was wiped out along with a row of other stores in a fire in May 2009.

“Mitch came over and said ‘I may be moving,’” Barry recalled about the days after the fire. “And I thought: that’s a good block.” Barry said that by having him to take over his store, Schab could get out of his lease earlier. “So he helped me and I helped him,” he added.

Before he opened for business in May 2010, though, Barry had extensive cleaning and renovations to do, and he ended up with many unexpected expenses. The biggest were associated with complying with updated city codes that came with such mandates as firewalls, an alarm system and the use of a city architect.

“It was very time consuming,” Barry recalled. “There were a lot of things involved that just don’t think about when you open offices. Thank goodness I had good fire insurance.”

The end result, though, has been a comparatively more spacious store, with five rooms (including two exam rooms and a lab) and a show room with beige walls and wood eyeglass display cases that sport frames from Giorgio Armani, Öga, Jhane Barnes and others.

“I love it,” Barry said about his latest store. “I like the location because you have so much traffic, from the pizza place to the supermarket to frozen yogurt shop next door. And you have parking here. That’s the big thing. You have the parking.”