Thomas Breen photo
Book Trader Cafe on Wednesday.
Store Manager Kelly Pyers.
A downtown used bookstore and cafe was burglarized early Wednesday morning when someone broke in through a side entrance, smashed open the register, then stole a few hundred dollars.
Book Trader Cafe, the two-decade-old local landmark located at 1140 Chapel St. by the corner of Chapel and York welcomed the New Year with a broken side door and roughly $200 in change pilfered from its cash register.
Store Manager Kelly Pyers said one of the bookstore/cafe’s employees discovered the broken glass side door and the cash register smashed on the kitchen floor just before 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday when he arrived to start the morning’s baking.
Book Trader Cafe at 1140 Chapel St.
“It just creates a mess,” Pyers said about the burglary. She and her employees had to put up a plywood plank over the broken door in the glass seating area, and had to clean up the mess caused by the burglar throwing the cash register against the floor until it broke open. She said nothing besides the money appeared to be taken from the store.
“Side door glass was broken to gain entry,” city police Lt. Derek Gartner wrote in a brief message sent at 4:28 a.m. through the city’s Everbridge emergency notification email system. “The cash register was smashed on the floor. Taken was about $200 cash from the register. The register was left on the scene. The business was equipped with surveillance cameras.”
The broken side door, now covered in plywood.
Pyers, who has worked at Book Trader for 19 years, said the store was last broken into and burglarized around a decade ago. On that occasion, she said, a burglar also smashed in the glass side door, but was not able to open the register. The store’s employee’s found the register intact and thrown in a garbage can on Chapel Street later that afternoon, she said.
Book Trader isn’t the only downtown small business to be burglarized in recent weeks. On Dec. 13, someone broken into the Trumbull Street vintage store Fashionista and stole several thousand dollars from its cash register.
Fashionista co-owner Todd Lyon said on Wednesday morning that the stolen money has not yet been recovered and no one has been apprehended in in the nearly three weeks since her store’s burglary.
“We’re still deep, deep in the woods,” she said.
One silver lining from the experience, she said, is that customers, neighbors, and other supports reached out to Fashionista after hearing about the burglary and bought gift certificates to the store.
“We’ve been busily beefing up our security,” she said. “It’s a long process for us.” Once the store finalizes just how much money was stolen, she said, she and co-owner Nancy Shea will start trying to recover some of what was lost through insurance.