Occasionally I find myself retracing a boyhood route, or part of a route, through my old neighborhood. With my father, or Uncle Harry, I used to head up Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village toward the 8th Street Bookshop, lose myself for a while at Discophile, the classical record store, then hit some of the used book dealers that constituted Booksellers Row along Fourth Avenue and Broadway.

More often than not, we ended up at the Strand bookstore.

Save for the Strand, the city’s biggest and most famous indie book shop, nearly all the rest is long gone, like the small-town, scruffy Village of the 1970s. What’s there now is a scrubbed, wealthy enclave punctuated by new luxury high rises and vacant storefronts.

You might think this would make the site of the Strand a no-brainer for landmark status. But its third-generation owner, Nancy Bass Wyden, is having none of it. Rallying its devotees, she has been scrambling to keep her beloved shop’s 11-story, 1902 Italianate building, 828 Broadway, designed by William H. Birkmire, off the city’s registry of designated landmarks. She says that landmark regulations would saddle her unionized, thin-margin business with potentially crippling burdens.