Nation's 'Weirdest Tackle Shop' Resurfaces Near Macy's

The first retail casualty of the embattled Chelsea Hotel's 2007 managerial coup d'etat has reopened on West 36th Street, near Macy's, according to British newspaper The Independent [via Living With Legends]:

For 44 years, Capitol Fishing Tackle lived next to the notorious Chelsea Hotel....

'Field and Stream' called Capitol "the weirdest tackle shop in America", with some justification. Only some of its clients, you see, were fishers. So the staff might sell a length of rope to a 6ft leather-clad woman more interested in tying her customers than a half-blood knot, or a tattooed weirdo who thought barbed gold hooks would look really neat stuck through his nose.

In addition to the weirdos, various presidents were rumored to be patrons of the place, as was the Sultan of Brunei -- whom the author described as a "keen saltwater angler," who "brought along his Uzi-toting bodyguards and closed the shop while he wandered its higgledy rows."

A guitar shop, an acupuncturist, a tattoo parlor, and the longstanding El Quiote restaurant still remain on the ground level of the hallowed West 23rd Street hotel.

But for how long?