David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple customers desperate to retrieve lost data and repair frozen hard drives, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 72.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, said his wife, Lorren Erstad, his only immediate survivor.
In 1987, 14 years before the first Apple Store, Mr. Lerner and Dick Demenus, a fellow former engineer at WBAI, the counterculture listener-supported FM radio station in New York, started what became Tekserve, a warren of workshops in four locations on West 23rd Street. The company was an immediate success.
In a single day, Mr. Lerner told The New York Times in 2002, the company sold computers to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission (an international public policy network and regular quarry of conspiracists) and the Communist Party (whose offices were down the block).
“Sometimes it seems as though everyone with a Mac in New York has been to Tekserve,” he added.
Tekserve specialized in finding the cures for sick computers — including insect infestations — and recovering first novels and other priceless data, which the company said it was able to do about 85 percent of the time.
“We only charged for success,” Mr. Lerner said.
He and Mr. Demenus transformed a two-man operation in Mr. Demenus’s loft apartment into a business whose customers were as eclectic as the 200 or so employees who served them at makeshift help desks well before Apple formally established and branded “genius bars” in their stores.
Jan Albert, Mr. Demenus’s wife, remembered on Facebook “the immense respect” that the company showed to “the creative folks who worked there — technically adept actors, musicians, inventors, writers and many young women who would shine, given their first chance to work with rapidly evolving technology.”
During the nearly three decades before Tekserve shuttered its retail operations in 2016 — because of rising rents and competition from Apple’s stores — the sales and service outlet was where Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker on HBO’s “Sex and the City,” raced when her PowerBook crashed. It was also the setting of Tamara Shopsin’s 2021 novel “LaserWriter II,” narrated by a 19-year-old newbie techie named Claire who works there.
“Shelves of vintage radios and telephones make up the bounds of the office,” Ms. Shopsin, who worked for a few months at Tekserve in the late 1990s, wrote. “A man whose suspenders curve around his belly introduces himself as David. Claire shakes his hand and notices he has no shoes on.”
The Mr. Lerner character she evoked may not have been warm and fuzzy, but he had a good heart and helped create a work ethic that evoked Tompkins Square Park in the East Village more than, say, Cupertino.
In “LaserWriter II,” when a repaired computer goes undelivered because Patty, an intake worker, got the client’s address wrong, Ms. Shopsin wrote that “David’s glasses go foggy from anger,” but Patty “is not afraid of being fired” because “no one at Tek gets fired.”
Well, almost no one. The novel has a character named Junior who is caught stealing computers, “and still David and Dick struggled with whether or not they should fire him” because he has children.
“David and Dick let him go,” Ms. Shopsin wrote, “but said they would still act as references.”
David Lawson Lerner, the younger of two brothers, was born on May 21, 1953, in Manhattan. His mother, Caroline (Steinholz) Lerner, handled public relations for artists. His father, Mortimer, was a lawyer.
He attended the Collegiate School in Manhattan but never graduated, having spent a disproportionate amount of time engrossed with the school’s audiovisual equipment and fascinated by electronics.
“David was self-educated but had an intuitive understanding of systematics, of how things worked,” his friend David Rapkin said in an interview. “He was an autodidactic of the highest order. He could fix anything.”
When he was volunteering at WBAI, Mr. Lerner met Mr. Demenus, a Columbia University engineering school graduate who had worked for RCA but quit in protest because of the company’s U.S. military contracts during the Vietnam War.
They and another techie, Mike Edl, formed Current Designs Corp., which made equipment for the listening stations at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and players for museum and walking audio tours.
In the early 1970s, when the first personal computers were being marketed, they bought one for their business at Macy’s for $2,500. Years later, when their Mac broke, authorized repair shops offered to fix it for $500; they restored it themselves for $135, and the idea for Tekserve was born. The partners propitiously rejected their original name, Three Ring Circuits.
Tekserve’s nimble, well-priced repairs helped keep Apple customers loyal to the California-based company despite early technological challenges, including chronically overheating motherboards. The symbiosis was like David rescuing Goliath, Mr. Demenus suggested in an interview.
“I think Tekserve saved Apple,” he said.
The store became an authorized Apple service center in 1993; the company’s chief executive, Tim Cook, once visited and pronounced it “interesting,” Mr. Lerner said.
According to Crain’s New York Business, Tekserve made nearly $100 million in sales and services in 2011 alone. Within five years, though, Apple opened several stores of its own in Manhattan, was becoming more proprietary and was taking an ever-bigger bite out of profits.
Tekserve survived as long as it did because it was the antithesis of Silicon Valley sleek. Customers entered through a turnstile and took a numbered ticket. They were awed by the three-dimensional archive of antique radios and Bakelite dial telephones, which were auctioned off when the store closed, and gravitated to the vintage red Coke machine restored by Mr. Lerner.
The appliance dispensed six-ounce bottles for a dime, and Tekserve reportedly lost 30 cents on each bottle.
“We thrive on chaos,” Mr. Demenus once told The Times. “Besides, if we’re going to have fun, the people around us have to be having fun.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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