By Kate Crane

The Cookie Crumbles Last Tuesday evening, Jon placed a newspaper in my left hand and a gift wrapped in crumpled foil in my right. "Look at this first," he instructed, pointing at the paper, "and then open that." He gets points for ingenuity, but even a vintage Wodehouse hardback couldn't tamp the blow. On Dec. 31, West Village institution Jon Vie Pastries will close after 42 years in business.

"I'm being pushed out," owner Nathan Prusack, 76, told me. "The coop board said they don't want food here. They're raising my rent to way over $10,000 a month. I wanted to put in a high-end restaurant; a bakery can no longer exist in a high-rent space selling baked goods alone."

The West Village was gentrified well before I became a customer in 1995. The more nefarious culprit is cultural: People have stopped consuming enough cake and cookies to keep the ovens fired.

I come from a line of rail-thin Czechs and stout Germans. Me, I take after the Germans, and I'm the spitting image of my father, who breezed past stout in his 30s, arriving at obese by the time he was 40. While I'm fine seeing my father's face every day in the mirror, I'm taking a pass on his torso; a healthy diet and exercise keep that specter at bay. But I thumb my nose at the dour old rebuke, "a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips." What feeds the soul is no more dispensable than calcium or B-12, and nothing in this city has fed my soul better than Jon Vie.

Once or twice a month for 10 years, I've stopped in for a slice of strudel, a macaroon, a black-and-white or hamantaschen, but I've window-shopped there several times each week without fail. Admiring the fancy cookies and lavish cakes, I'd toss a wave through the glass to Sid Kryshka, who's been with the bakery for 29 years. Jon Vie's old-world commitment to perfection shaped my understanding of New York, and its presence has given me a sense of roots.

"There's nowhere else that an owner and his customers have loved each other so much for so long," says Prusack, whose third generation of customers is now coming in with parents who themselves first came to Jon Vie as children.

The crowds of customers have been somber; I'm clearly not the only one who's mourning. And when I mentioned Jon Vie's demise to my therapist, her face fell. In a rare breach of protocol, she pulled a Jon Vie bag from her rucksack and confessed a deep fondness for the cream-cheese bar.