If you were around Manhattan in the 1990s, you hated Barnes & Noble the way you hated garbage strikes or Celine Dion. The chain seemed to expand on a weekly basis, and it got in the way — of the independent book stores it displaced, of a Jane Jacobs vision of the streetscape, of your belief that you were living in a place that was so much more idiosyncratic than wherever you came from.

When Amazon, even more gargantuan and impersonal, emerged to send Barnes & Noble toward its inevitable descent, you eventually found yourself nostalgic for what you had failed to appreciate.

In no place was the company’s diminished fortune felt as intensely as it was in the Bronx, where gratitude for what it provided far outweighed snobbishness. Five years ago when Barnes & Noble announced that it was closing the only branch it had opened there, residents and local civic leaders were angry and heartbroken and fought to save it.

At the time, there were 90 bookstores in Manhattan. But the Bronx essentially had just the one, and now it would disappear. Those who lived in the Bronx couldn’t help feeling that the gatekeepers of cultural commerce found them unworthy.