Community

Selling Chess Sets, Creating a Community

By Ryan Kim

Spectrum staff

Chess pieces clack against tabletop chess boards with peeling paint and scratched wood. The sound of orchestral strings streams in. Seated on opposing sides of the boards, the chess players murmur. They ponder their next move.

Standing behind what doubles as a display case and sales counter at Chess Forum, Imad Khachan, who owns the place, takes in the full view. The space is tight. One body can walk the single aisle separating the 11 tables for playing chess. The people are a mix of children and adults of different races and from different places.

He smiles.

“Your bank account, your pedigree, who the hell you are, [we] really don’t care. You just come here and play the sport for the sport,” said Khachan, 53, who began playing chess back in Lebanon. His country was at war. Chess, played by flashlight, was their entertainment and distraction.

“There were explosions. But instead of being scared, we had chess. One guy was famous for being a coward. But even a coward, locked up in a house, goes crazy,” he said. “So he used to risk–with no electricity, no light in the streets, with a fear of the explosions–carrying his chess set and coming to my house just to play with my family.”

In 1995, Khachan bought the shop from former owner, Nicolas Rossolino. The business sells chess boards, but it tries to achieve more than that, Khachan said.

“This place is called Chess Forum. Not Chess World. Not Chess Shop. It’s a place of ideas and dialogue, and chess is just the facilitator.”

The players are a mixed group. They range from children and students to seniors and celebrities. They are red and yellow, black and white. What ties them together is a love of chess.

“Chess is a great bonding time for me and my son,” said Frantz Marine, of Suffern, 35 miles northwest of Manhattan. “It’s a very intricate game because you have to think two, three, four, five, six steps ahead.”

His son, Jackson Marine, was with him that day at Chess Forum.

“Chess,” the 7^th-grader said, “is fun because of the strategy. You have to find where your enemies stand and strike them at the right place.”

Rene Munoz, who teaches computer technology to middle-schoolers, started an afterschool chess program at a Bronx school. “Chess means freedom. But it’s also an opportunity. The game has allowed me to interact with my students on a more personal level.”

“[Chess] is quite nice,” said Bruno Birolli, a Paris-based novelist, who discovered Chess Forum in July 2018—and spent seven days straight there. “Here, I could talk to different people and make different relationships … make a community.”

It costs $5 an hour to play on one of the 11 tables at Chess Forum; $1 for seniors at least 60 years old; and nothing for kids. The low costs are Khachan’s way of keeping the place open and available to a variety of comers.

“This is an icon, a character,” he said. “And it’s part of the soul of the city … Without a place like this, New York is missing a part of its soul.”

People don’t just come to Chess Forum to play or learn chess. Some also have stopped in there as part of a first date, to make a marriage proposal, and to say “I do.”

That isn’t the only kind of affection blossoming at Chess Forum.

“I love, love Imad,” said Frenchman Birolli, also a former Asia correspondent for Nouvel Observateur magazine. “He’s not only a shop owner, but he’s also a man that has a lot of exchanges with other people. I really feel at home because of him.”

Khachan hopes he and Chess Forum make people feel that way for a long time, and that they will approach the game as purely as he does. He doesn’t like, for example, that some people play chess online, instead of sitting across from an actual opponent.

“This is a business dinosaur,” a seemingly exasperated, yet hopeful Khachan said, raising both his forearms and opening his palms. It was as if he was introducing a newcomer to the space.

“One day,” he added, “this might be a Starbucks and no one will remember all the people that I’ve seen. Everyone that came had a memory … I hope [this] stays for another thousand years. And I’ll be there, hopefully, in a thousand years.”