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When West Side Kids moved from the “hot” corner of 498 Amsterdam Avenue and West 84th Street — where it had held court for 42 years — to the former John Koch Antiques shop just steps away at 201 West 84th (in the same building), we were worried.
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“I didn’t even tell people this, but I was going to close,” owner Jennifer Bergman told ILTUWS about her situation in 2023. The antique shop shuttering wound up giving her a window to keep going. “I mean, it’s been a ride, you know, it’s been a ride, and this has never been a burden,” Bergman said.
Now, the big kid of West Side Kids is getting ready to get wild about what’s next.
A trip to India last March inspired Bergman. “God. It was amazing,” she said. “Well, actually, I’m a quilter, and I love textiles, and we spent a lot of time shopping for textiles that I brought back, that I’ve been selling here.”
Bergman would love to continue on that trajectory — “if I can.”
She spent time in the ancient Pink City of Jaipur, surrounded by “lovely people” and amazing food — a world apart from the “Wild West” she was told about when growing up with her parents in a $200-a-month rent-controlled apartment on West 95th Street.
“It was gritty,” said the born-and-raised local, who entered the world in 1967. “It was a homesteading street, and all the brownstones were boarded up, and people were, you know, buying them for nothing.” She referred to this era of the UWS as a “totally different world” — the days you couldn’t be in Central Park or go down side streets at night.
“It was actually worse in the ’90s because of crack,” said the West Sider who lived through it.
She doesn’t buy into the narrative that the UWS is going backwards in terms of safety and atmosphere.
“They’re overreacting.”
Bergman was ready to declare West Side Kids over while dreaming about the future in August 2022, telling her landlord she’d be closing the following year. “I was going to close. Post-COVID, I couldn’t afford my rent anymore,” she said. “And I have very fair landlords.” Bergman described her landlords as a mom-and-pop operation who had supported her throughout all 44 years in business. “My landlords are great,” she said, crediting them for helping her business survive COVID.
Then came June 2024, when things crashed — a month she’d come to call “Third Christmas” for the usual surge of sales it brought in. No more.
“We were 17% down that summer compared to the year before, and that really hurt.”
West Side Kids’ business was flat the Christmas before, and then they started having days in January, February, and March they’d never seen before — “like under $1,000. It was beyond slow,” she said. “That was after the election, and it never improved.”
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She doesn’t blame online shopping for hurting business. Tariffs, though? Oh no.
“It’s just all the unknowns,” she flared. “People just stop spending, and my vendors were saying, ‘We’re not bringing anything in, or we’re bringing it in and your prices are going up 10 or 15 percent.’”
Bergman was changing prices on her goods like it was Crazy Eddie running the show. “All I was doing was changing prices and, like, making — and I didn’t have the money to buy stuff.”
When scooter prices went up $30, that was the last straw. “In June [2025], we were 33 to 40 percent down. And I called my landlord and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
In an Instagram post shared on Tuesday, she announced the store would be open through the end of July, though she told us her lease goes through September. We asked if she might use the time to turn the space into a studio to fire up some textile projects.
“Exactly, exactly,” she replied, before inviting anyone reading this to collaborate. “If someone wants to do a pop-up or something like that, you know, give me a call.”
This creative bat signal from Bergman — whose mom, Alice, first opened this historic UWS business in 1981 — is a special ingredient in creative pursuits. When you see the end of something coming, what do you do?
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Bergman has already moved with her husband and two stepchildren to Hartford, Connecticut. She’s found a new favorite Indian spot there. “Better than anything I’ve had in New York,” she said.
We had to ask the current Queen of West Side Kids what toy from her life experience best reflected her spirit.
“My favorite toys growing up were… well, I loved everything but dolls and stuffed animals—I used to build them houses out of boxes and things. They were very detailed — I’d make all the furniture out of egg cartons and decorate them.”
“I was very artistic and loved to draw. But yeah, what I really remember is my little, tiny hedgehog named Frederick. He had this little house that I made him.”
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