When a year-old Bed-Stuy bookstore starts a fundraiser after a flood, the easy version is a story about the weather. Tiffany Dockery is telling a different one. The owner of Gladys Books & Wine at 306 Malcolm X Boulevard says the basement floods over and over, that the repairs are her landlord’s responsibility, and that the roughly $59,000 strangers have handed her is partly meant to force the issue.
“We’ve been dealing with repeated flooding in our basement, and it isn’t a one-time accident. It’s a pattern,” Dockery writes on the GoFundMe, which had pulled in about $59,000 from more than 800 donors as of publication. She says she has “spent months trying to get our landlord to take it seriously and make the repairs that are their responsibility.” That is her account. The landlord is not named in her telling and has not given a public response, so the repair-responsibility claim is hers to make, not a settled fact.
The layout is what makes the water so expensive. Gladys keeps books upstairs and the bar downstairs, on the same lower level that takes on water. Brownstoner and the trade outlet Shelf Awareness covered the store when it opened in September 2025, built around Black queer and Black feminist literary culture. Dockery, 37, left a job at Google to open it and named it for her late grandmother Gladys, a Mississippi sharecropper who, BKReader reports, gave her a lifelong love of reading. The part of the business that floods is the part that was supposed to pay the rent and hold the room.
The neighborhood answered fast. The Brooklyn Eagle reported neighbors rallying to save the shop, and the fundraiser cleared $50,000. That is real money, and Dockery is clear it is not just for drywall. She describes it as cleanup, waterproofing, and a legal effort to hold the landlord accountable, which turns a GoFundMe into something closer to a tenant repair fight with a public ledger.
It is a familiar squeeze with a Bed-Stuy address: a ground-floor small business, a basement that keeps filling, and a dispute over who is on the hook to keep it dry, all of it playing out as the block gentrifies around one of the few Black-queer, Black-feminist literary spaces left in a fast-gentrifying Bed-Stuy.
Dockery’s own account of the flooding and the running total of what the neighborhood has raised are on the Rebuild Gladys Books & Wine fundraiser, which is also where she says the money goes toward waterproofing and the legal push. Anyone who wants the store, or the precedent it is trying to set with a landlord, to survive can read it there before the next storm.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily
