NYC Bodegas Are A Window Into The Boroughs’ Uneven Recovery

Source: Bloomberg, Yueqi Yang
Photo: Amir Hamja/Bloomberg

Eastern District store in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

One store owner near Times Square is considering shutting down permanently, while in Park Slope a couple just opened their second Brooklyn location.

In New York City, no one has the pulse of a neighborhood quite the same way a bodega owner does. Dotted across hundreds of communities, these roughly 13,000 convenience stores have been a window into the state of mind and financial health of their local residents during the pandemic.

Francisco Marte’s northwest Bronx bodega saw neighbors getting infected by the virus and losing their jobs, pushing regulars to plead to put groceries on tab. About 20 miles away in Park Slope, Samrat Shah and Samiksha Shah recently opened their second store in Brooklyn following the success with their first selling premium items from organic milk to locally sourced jam.

Their fates epitomize the uneven impact of the Covid-19 crisis in the five boroughs: Bodegas in low-income communities battled with a spike of unemployment, robberies and even shootings; stores in Manhattan’s office and tourist areas suffered from the lack of foot traffic, while those in affluent residential neighborhoods saw a steady flow of business as the working-from-home crowd shopped locally and spent more time cooking.

Hundreds of bodegas, a name derived from the Spanish word for “storeroom” or “wine cellar,” shut down at the height of the pandemic last spring, with many closing permanently, according to Marte, who represents the Bodega and Small Business Group in the city. Here is a snapshot of four of these quintessentially New York City businesses and how they coped with the outbreak.

Marte left Dominican Republic when he was 19, following his brother’s footsteps into the world of bodegas in the Bronx. He started from high-crime neighborhoods with a lot of “tough guys,” he said, and has survived two gunshots. At 50, he now owns three bodegas in the borough, including New Green Earth Deli in Norwood, a working-class Hispanic neighborhood.

Many bodegas are located in a “food desert,” where they become the main source of groceries for their neighborhood and operate into the wee hours of the night, making them a target for crime.

In the first eight months of the pandemic, shooting incidents inside or in front of bodegas and corner stores surged 63%, killing six people, according to police department data cited by the New York Times. Burglaries and robberies also rose.

Having operated in a rough neighborhood, Marte has learned to defuse tense situations. Instead of refusing service to unmasked customers, he would offer them free masks. He has talked people out of stealing, allowing them to buy food on credit and pay back when their stimulus checks arrive — as long as they aren’t buying cigarettes or alcohol.

Still, the financial distress of the community weighed on Marte’s business. In January, the unemployment rate in the Bronx was almost 18%, compared with 6.3% nationwide. The borough also had higher Covid infection and death rates than the average for the city. Serving two nearby schools, gyms and a local mechanic store, Marte went from selling 150 sandwiches a day to just 50.

But sales are starting to look up again, Marte said, narrowing the gap from pre-pandemic levels to 25%, from 60% last spring. He’s even talking about plans to remodel his kitchen to provide healthier options like juice and salad. “I hope next month everything will be better, when the schools open in full,” he said.

For the Shahs, a young couple from Nepal, premium, healthy food has become the key selling point.

After a successful run with their Eastern District store in Greenpoint, where they said sales have been strong through the pandemic year, they’re offering similar organic snacks and groceries at their second store, a testament to the robust demand in the middle-class, residential Brooklyn neighborhoods that they serve.

Eastern District stayed open throughout the outbreak and saw new customers seeking out its staples when other stores shut down. Its popular items are milk, cheese, craft beer, as well as sandwiches served in fresh baguette and ciabatta. Online sales were up about 15% during the pandemic, with June, July and the year-end holidays being the busiest times.

That prompted the couple to scout for a location for a new store. They settled on Park Slope, a larger, family-oriented neighborhood that would provide a clientele willing to pay premium prices for healthy food. They aren’t alone — on Park Slope’s commercial strip of Fifth Avenue, new businesses have sprouted up to take over the vacant storefronts.

“We saw this pandemic as an opportunity rather than a challenge,” said Samiksha Shah, 32, who runs the daily operations.

The Punjabi Deli sits in the usually vibrant East Village area in Manhattan, once a popular spot among cab drivers seeking its $7.50 Indian vegetarian platter. That was pre-pandemic, and owner Kulwinder Singh, 64, said he hasn’t yet seen the city’s recovery translating to a substantial increase in business.

Taxi drivers only account for 10% to 15% of his customers now, and business is still down 70% from pre-Covid times. “Taxis used to work until morning,” he said in his store on a weekday evening. “Now after 10 p.m, the city freezes.”

While government assistance such as the Paycheck Protection Program loans are intended to help small businesses weather the pandemic, many bodega owners have difficulty providing the documents to apply for the loans. They run their business on a notebook and pay cash to staff, said Youssef Mubarez, a spokesman for the Yemeni American Merchants Association, which has been providing assistance and translation for bodega owners.

The lack of paperwork and valid immigration status also affected their ability to get vaccinated. Even though bodega staff are frontline workers — the city added “bodega” to its eligible category after its initial omission created confusion — many are undocumented immigrants and are wary of providing job information to vaccination sites. Mubarez’s association wants the government to confirm that undocumented workers’ information would be protected after they get vaccinated.

Up in Times Square, office employees and foot traffic may be starting to come back, but not tourists. That may be the last straw for a local bodega run by Mubarez’s family, which is considering shutting it down permanently after failing to get rent relief from the landlord.

“If you are looking at a low-income neighborhood in Brooklyn, they’re willing to negotiate or to give some relief,” said Mubarez, 32. “But a Times Square landlord probably isn’t really worried about money. He probably wanted to get rid of us so that he can hopefully attract the big box business to come put their location there.”

In “Reconstructions” at the Museum of Modern Art, African-American designers and artists envision an architecture of Blackness that grapples with the field’s troubled history.

A wheeled off-kilter black-steel framework, among the first items the visitor encounters on the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art, could be taken as an industrial remnant mounted with sails to carry it away.

A closer examination of the work — “The Refusal of Space” by architect and professor Mario Gooden — reveals it as an armature to document protests and host short videos on 1960s civil rights actions in Nashville. Its wheels evoke the trolley lines built in 1905 by African-American businessmen in response to a law requiring segregated streetcars. White interests sabotaged the lines, forcing them to close.

In its haunting ambiguity, “The Refusal of Space” signals that MoMA’s new exhibition, “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” is not the polite parade of progress that is the standard fare of exhibits on architecture. “Mario’s protest machine is about mobility,” says Mabel Wilson, a professor at Columbia University’s school of architecture and a co-organizer of the exhibition, which runs through May 31. “The logic of the ghetto is to limit you. It says you cannot go here, or do this. If freedom is about that ability to move, then a protest machine that is mobile is important.”

Wilson and co-organizer Sean Anderson, an associate curator at MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, concluded that the museum’s first exhibition on Black architecture had to engage fundamental questions. After all, Wilson, when he searched for museum holdings at MoMA on Black architecture, came up all but empty handed.

That is in part a legacy of department founder Philip Johnson, whose devotion to the aesthetics of architecture shut out all else. Activists have demanded that Johnson’s name be removed from the gallery where “Reconstructions” is being shown, because of Johnson’s white supremacist views and Nazi sympathies. While the museum considers the activists’ demand, the show’s artists created a fabric banner that covers up Johnson’s name.

“Architecture” and “Blackness” have historically rarely found themselves in the same sentence. Architects often claim their designs are racially neutral without considering the kinds of systems and practices their buildings embody. And the field has not succeeded in its wayward efforts at inclusion over the years. African Americans currently make up only about 2% of licensed architects, according to the National Council of Architecture Registration Boards. One young architect recently told me that she was the 463rd Black woman to be licensed as an architect — ever.

The 10 installations in the MoMA exhibition, each drawn from a different city, elaborately collage and layer histories, stories, touchstones, geographies and speculations. On a screen, a montage of mainly still photos by David Hartt of Watts, in Los Angeles, adds a documentary-film quality to the exhibition by capturing moments of calm amid the heedless city cacophony. Skinny palm trees against the sky and a clump of tropical greenery bursting out of a bleak public-housing wall assert the right to beauty.

Several artists and designers addressed the spatial nature of Black oppression, Wilson says. “The plantation becomes the ghetto. Apartheid is a spatial logic. It continued with redlining, subprime mortgages, and why the pandemic hit Black and brown populations with such force.”

Architect/artist Amanda Williams, for example, chose Kinloch, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis that drew African-American residents in the early 20th century and was incorporated as the state’s first Black city in 1948. In her sprawling, muralistic “We’re Not Down There, We’re Over Here,” images collide with scrambled cartographic meridians and borders swooping in all directions, arguably smashing the neatly redlined precincts. A “space ship” of found objects hangs from the wall. “She’s recognizing the refusal by Black people to be penned in,” said Wilson.

The piece celebrates that self-determination, but does not mourn its fate: Most residents left Kinloch when their homes were bought out by the city for a 1980s airport expansion project that was never built. Its population much diminished, much of the surviving town was bulldozed in 2015 for a warehouse development. “Black space is fleeting, fleeing, taking flight, unmoored,” Williams writes in the catalog — themes of people asserting agency and taking flight have defined Black America from the beginning of slavery, exhibit organizers Anderson and Wilson pointed out. (MoMA will mount another Williams installation, “Embodied Sensations” in its vast atrium, opening April 10.)

Across from Williams’s piece, architect J. Yolande Daniels uses three-dimensional wireframe maps that pull apart “topographic layers of L.A.’s forgotten history,” according to Anderson, in “black city: the Los Angeles Edition.” She augments the maps with short, evocatively illustrated biographies of such lost places as Calle de los Negros and the Mason Block, named for Biddy Mason, who had been a slave but became an early real-estate entrepreneur. The maps show “ghosted layers of the historic city,” Anderson says. “It’s acknowledging that those erasures happened and the afterlives of those erasures we are living with.”

In some fashion, Anderson says, all the participants took up the curators’ invitation to “re-imagine the built environment, to take the past and ask, what if?”

Some participants explored “ways of becoming black,” says Wilson. “You make a space for life, for family, for fellowship, for anger, for revolt. You see how those things are entangled in all of the projects.”

In Emanuel Admassu’s “Immeasurability,” a Waffle House restaurant sign becomes iconic by being removed from its natural habitat, the highway strip. “He is thinking about the social spaces of black life that don’t typically get registered,” says Wilson. Admassu describes the open-all-night diner chain that’s a staple of Atlanta’s highways as “an extension of the nightclub.”

The Jamaican-born architect Sekou Cooke, who is based in Syracuse, New York, brought in an actual well-worn concrete stoop in “We Outchea: Hip-Hop Fabrications and Public Space.” The porch, the stoop and the street corner are the essential and human-scaled sites where African Americans invent their own social life, when other public places are only intermittently available and risky.

Cooke chose Syracuse’s much-contested 15th Ward, a Black neighborhood serially decimated by an interstate highway and public housing — a story many cities could tell. A planned redevelopment now promises to bring mixed-income housing to the community, potentially displacing more people. Cooke proposes to subvert it by incising the blocky, generic structures he presumes will come with shed and gable-roofed structures that introduce the porch-and-stoop past. These surgical intrusions leave behind outdoor spaces and public interiors that can host a richer public life than the lawns and parking lots of the proposed project.

Miami-based architect Germane Barnes suspends shelves of spice bottles from the ceiling for his piece, “A Spectrum of Blackness: The Search for Sedimentation in Miami.” “You not only see all these different spices, you see the way Dominicans use spice versus the way Jamaicans did,” says Wilson. “When Barnes, who is from Chicago, moved to Miami, he recognized that Black is multi-lingual — Creole, French, Spanish, Portuguese.” Wall-hung collages, both touching and ironic, are titled “kitchen portrayals” and “porch typologies.”

Three of the “Reconstructions” participants speculate on what tomorrow’s urban reality could look like.

Artist Olalekan Jeyifous offers prodigiously complex and intricate dystopian visions of a New York transformed by climate change in “The Frozen Neighborhoods,” computer-generated images and videos that capture the joyfully chaotic improvisation inspired by global megacities. Subway cars are stacked as dwellings on top of each other; a ticketing kiosk is repurposed as an entry to virtual worlds. Another image shows a global melange of people and vendors swarming the streets, in front of sober apartment buildings now festooned with advertising signs and bursting with plantings. A gondola glides serenely overhead.

“He’s drawing on an amazing collage tradition,” said Wilson. “With a few adjustments these streetscapes could be Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, Lagos, or Brixton in London.”

Architect V. Mitch McEwen, co-founder of the New York-based Atelier Office, uses her piece, “R:R,” to ask what New Orleans might look like if the enslaved peoples’ uprising of 1811 had succeeded, instead of being cruelly crushed. “She’s trying to imagine a logic of what that liberation would be,” says Wilson. The project envisions a city that could fit gracefully into its watery landscape, using building techniques and materials that could be made locally. Recognizing Black people have been exploited by markets rather than benefiting from them, her project shows a New Orleans whose “architecture would not be reliant on capitalist systems,” says Wilson.

“You make a space for life, for family, for fellowship, for anger, for revolt. You see how those things are entangled in all of the projects.”

The landscape architect Walter Hood’s “Black Towers/Black Power” offers a different kind of alternative landscape: His installation shows Oakland’s San Pablo Avenue redesigned to embody the 10-point program of the Black Panther Party, which was founded in Oakland in 1966. Famously, the Panthers provided free breakfasts for school children and a network of medical clinics that inspired similar programs at the federal level that continue to operate today.

“That was one of the most innovative moments of change in Oakland’s history,” says Wilson. In Hood’s piece, totemic black sculptures — models for skyscrapers — march in a line in front of monumental cutaway drawings, each representing a different element of the Panther’s community-building agenda.

“Reconstructions” promises to have a life beyond the walls of the museum: To carry the show’s mission forward—and in recognition of the limits of a modest exhibition with a tight budget — the participants came together to found the Black Reconstruction Collective. In its brief manifesto, it dedicates itself to dismantling systemic white supremacy in art, design and academia. Future plans include support for proposals that could lead to built projects, research and other means of documentation and outreach.

The group’s mission statement is proclaimed on the fabric banner now obscuring Philip Johnson’s name at MoMa: “We dedicate ourselves to doing the work of designing another world that that is possible, here, where we are, with and for us.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-26/the-design-history-of-beirut-s-central-hall-homes