By Veronika Bondarenko HBO’s “Sex and the City” once gave this iconic department store a shoutout. The pandemic and the shifting face of retail have been particularly hard on the American department store. Once-iconic institutions like Lord & Taylor, Brooks Brothers, and Neiman Marcus teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. And over 200 department stores permanently shut their doors between when covid-19 first came to the U.S. in 2020 and today. While less known in the rest of the country, one loss felt particularly strongly was New York’s Century 21. Founded out of Brooklyn in 1964, the chain of …