Parent: "There are more smoke shops than bookshops." She's right.
An offhanded remark sent me down a data rabbit hole. What I found made me wince.
When I worked at a large community-serving nonprofit in New York City, I had a conversation with a mom in the Bronx that I still think about. We stood near Fordham Road, discussing literacy and its place in her family’s life, when she tossed off a remark so casual it almost slipped past me.
“You know,” she said, “it’s easier for me to find a smoke shop in my neighborhood than a bookshop.”
I understood what she meant. Anyone walking down the street could see it: ample opportunities to buy cigarettes, precious few to buy a book. But I found myself wondering how literally true her statement was, not just on her stretch of sidewalk but across the entire city. So I dove into the data.
A Sidewalk Comment Becomes a Dataset
First, I went to the State website and downloaded the most recent dataset on tobacco sales licenses. Then I cobbled together my own inventory of booksellers: records from the Independent Bookstore Association, the larger chains I could identify scattered around the five boroughs, and every public library branch. It was not a perfect dataset; I will concede that freely. But it was a thorough one, assembled in response to a single afternoon’s offhanded comment. I merged the two lists and visualized them on a map.
The results were stunning.
Why the Map Matters
Access to literacy stands as one of the strongest indicators of a child’s preparedness for school. Researchers have documented what they call the “million word gap”: the staggering difference in language exposure between children who are read to regularly from birth and those who are not. A child whose evenings brim with stories, whose parents narrate the world aloud, whose household treats reading as ordinary rather than aspirational, arrives at kindergarten with a formidable advantage. The inverse is equally true and equally consequential.
Literacy, though, is not merely a skill drilled in classrooms. It flourishes in the informal spaces between parents and children: bedtime stories, conversations about a character’s strange decision, the idle flipping of pages on a Saturday morning. All of that matters immensely. And all of it requires, at minimum, the physical presence of books.
So if you want to understand why literacy scores in New York City remain stubbornly low, one question deserves more attention than it typically receives: what kind of access do families of different socioeconomic backgrounds actually have to books and reading experiences? Mapping smoke shops against bookshops renders that question visible, geographic, irrefutable.
Igniting Reading
What does it mean to make literacy genuinely available to families? When I worked at that nonprofit, we sent thousands of books into the homes of children between the ages of zero and five. Those books made some difference; I believe that. But even that effort was not enough. Libraries remain perennially underfunded. Too little emphasis falls on the quiet, unspectacular importance of simply having exposure to books and to reading experiences.
I am grateful for the comment that mom made to me that afternoon in the Bronx. A passing observation on a sidewalk became a dataset, then a map, then a picture of a city that has made it easier to light a cigarette than to open a book.
We can do better than that. We have to.