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- Nuthouse Hardware
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202 E. 29th St., nr. Third Ave.; 212-545-1447
You need two principal things in a hardware store. The first is comprehensive selection, and Nuthouse certainly has that. It sprawls over three floors plus the basement of a sizable four-story building, and stocks not only the usual bolts and springs and electrical cable but also hard-to-find plumbing valves and specialized tools and such. The cheerful if occasionally eccentric staff will cut lumber to size; they’ll mix paint colors to order. The housewares section noses into upscale-department-store territory, with cheery polka-dotted kitchen accessories and Le Creuset enameled cookware. Yes, you can get a lot of that stuff elsewhere—which brings us to the second thing you need in a hardware store: access to their stuff at any hour. Nuthouse Hardware is open 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, which means that when the aforementioned hard-to-find plumbing valve breaks in the middle of the night, this place is the only game in town.
Best Hardware Store
From the 2012 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine