A Brooklyn bookstore was cleaning up more than just snow on Thursday after a pipe burst, sending water gushing through the ceiling and drenching hundreds of books.
Rebecca Fitting, one of the co-owners of Greenlight Bookstore, spent much of the snow day mopping up the store — there was an inch of standing water in places — and checking every book for damage.
“There were waterfalls coming out of the ceiling and the light sockets,” she said, adding when they turned all the lights off “it looked like a horror movie.”
Water began coming through the ceiling of their Flatbush Avenue location in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens at about 6 p.m. on Wednesday night, Fitting said. The water damaged about two-thirds of the store and flooded the basement. Employees at the store, she said, were able to save a lot of inventory, but she estimated more than 750 books were waterlogged.
“Every time a new leak sprang, they were moving books to another part of the store to save them,” she said.
But the shop, Greenlight Bookstore’s second location, will be open for business on Friday, as Fitting called it “the little bookstore that could.”
“We’ll open with big gaps in our fiction section and kids section,” she said. “It could have been so much worse. The store looks surprisingly OK today, all things considered … It will be OK.”
The store’s original location is at Fulton Street in Fort Greene.
Correction: An earlier version of this article had an incorrect location of the bookstore in the headline. The correct location is Prospect-Lefferts Gardens.
