On May 7, 2020, owner Parul Patel announced that the physical store would not re-open due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and rent increases, despite community efforts and a social media campaign to keep it open.[15][16][17]
The site was an outlet for the Chain Shirt Shop in 1922, and "Gem's Spa" had opened by the 1950s.[18][16] Sociologist Daniel Bell, who claimed in the 1970s that his uncle Hymie created the egg cream, says that another man called Hymie owned a candy store serving egg creams on the site of Gem Spa in the 1920s.[19]Village Voice reported in the 1970s that people remembered going to the store before World War I.[20] For thirty years up until 1957 the store was owned by the Goldfeder family.[4]
It had been a Beat mecca in the 1950s, a hippie hangout in the sixties and more recently was the scene of a famous photograph of the Dolls.
From 1957 until at least 1969 the store was owned by Ruby Silverstein and Harold Shepard, who employed 11 staff to keep it open 24 hours a day - Silverstein estimated that every 30 seconds someone walked in the store. The clientele initially mainly bought Jewish and foreign-language papers, which began to change around 1963 as they sold more copies of the Village Voice and underground magazines. Silverstein and Shepard gave the store its current name, initially Gem's Spa - the name came from Gladys, Etta, and Miriam, the names of the wives of Silverstein and Shepard and Shepard's ex-wife.[4]
The owner in 1971 was Irving Stein.[26] That year Village Voice reported "A permanent cluster of junkies using its doorways and newspaper benches as home base hasn't helped business any"[27] and the store was closed for a time from February 1972 when it ran into financial trouble[20] and the counter-culture that had helped support it collapsed.[28] The storefront caught fire that May,[29] but it reopened that June with new management.[28]
The owner as of 2015 was Ray Patel, who was born in the early 1940s in Gujarat, India. He ran the store with his wife and bought the store in 1986, when he replaced one brick wall with glass. He did no advertising and relied instead on word of mouth.[30] He learned making egg creams from the previous Italian owner, who in turn learned it from his Jewish predecessor.[31] The store manager Salim said in 2010 that only four people knew the recipe.[32] Patel's daughter Parul, a former Morgan Stanley financial advisor, took over the business from her father in 2018 because he was suffering from Parkinson's disease.[33]
Gem Spa sign being removed from the storefront on May 17th, 2020.
Gem Spa merchandise was introduced for the first time in 2019, and its T-shirt became popular. So much so that Eater magazine called it the "Hottest Look in Streetwear" just a couple of days after Fashion Week ended in September 2019, after it caught the attention of fashion influencers like former Calvin Klein model Remy Holwick and designer Kyle Brincefield of Studmuffin NYC.[citation needed] While efforts to save it were underway, in May 2020, Gem Spa closed permanently, due to lack of business from the COVID-19 pandemic.[34] After its closure, Gem Spa announced it would continue to operate an online store selling branded merchandise.[35][36]
^Lauckner, Sally (19 October 2010). "A Literary Tour of the East Village". The Local. The Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and The New York Times. Retrieved 2 January 2011.
^ abValentine, Gary (2006). "2. Village of the Damned". New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation with Blondie, Iggy Pop, and Others, 1974-1981. Da Capo Press. p. 27. ISBN1-56025-944-2.
