When Kim’s Video & Music announced that this summer it would be closing its last store, on First Avenue in the East Village, written tributes ranged from the resigned to the exultant. “Kim’s was this portal into New York City I never came back from,” Eddie Huang, the restaurateur, author and television personality, wrote in a blog post. “Everything in my life, I can somehow attribute to finding Kim’s.”

Of course, the jig had been up since Kim’s flagship store, on St. Marks Place, shuttered in 2009. The owner, Yongman Kim, consolidated what had grown to a four-store empire into one, and he shipped his 55,000-film collection to Sicily, where there was a fairy-tale promise that the films would find new life.

Pressed by higher rents, Mr. Kim said, he plans to close the First Avenue store at the end of next month, 27 years after he opened the first one, on Avenue A, in 1987. But this is more than a story of rising rents and the disruption wrought by digital streaming. It’s the tale of a downtown culture now largely lost, one in which clerks and creative types mingled, influencing one another and the scene as well.

“Kim’s was where we went to get our gold,” said the filmmaker and New York University film professor Alexandre Rockwell (“In the Soup”). “They had porn, B movies and highbrow art films. Kim’s made film funky and accessible to people who were hanging out and getting high and bussing tables who stumbled in.”