“What am I going to write about?” I asked myself as I awoke still feeling the pain from the removal of a “calcified nut shell” from my lower intestines that had kept me in writhing, sleepless discomfiture on a too-small hospital bed at Lenox Hill Hospital for a week.
And we were late, late, oh god, were we late, and then WNYC offered Leonard Lopate interviewing Manhattan Boro President, Gail Brewer, offering legislation that would stay the landlord’s hand from the new lease guillotine.
I called her young press officer, who cheered me by expressing delight at knowing my name or at least that of WestView News. Yes, he said, he would e-mail the press release (although it still has not come) and, yes, he would call Gail to see if she wanted to make a news-worthy statement for the front page (for days no call—as I write this I finally get a call, but, alas, it is only “she is too busy today.”)
Back in the hospital, Leonard opened asking Gail if she agreed “it is more than tax revenue and jobs that should make government intervene to save small business?”
And Gail answered, roughly, “Absolutely, as you know I was working with the then-city-council member Ruth Messenger back in the nineteen eighties to introduce legislation and then when I was on the City Council I passed zoning legislation to limit the number of banks. Goodness knows, I had 70 banks in my district. And I also introduced legislation to limit the size of stores on Amsterdam and Columbus.”
The new legislation that Brewer was promoting would allow a small business 180-day notice before the end of the lease to negotiate with the help of a mediator. If no deal is reached, the tenant could get an extension of up to a year with a small increase.
“Now, as you know, small business preservationist, Jeremiah Moss wants something more than that” interrupted Leonard, playing a segment from last week’s Moss interview. (Jeremiah Moss is an internet activist avatar—this is a new species.)
Moss enunciated, “That plan is really going to make things worse for small businesses—it is voluntary and not binding. All it does is give a one-year extension with a 15 percent increase so the business can find a new location and the landlord can find another Starbucks.”
Brewer countered dryly, “The bill Jeremiah is talking about is the job preservation bill which has been bottled up in the city council since the eighties,” and then went on to catalogue the discussions that would now take place to presumably discover which bill is best or which bill is not so great, but at least has a chance to pass.
Gail’s interview made me reflect back in time to the war years (the forties that is) when the Village had just lived through a soul eroding depression. Let’s take a look at how many memorable, worth saving small businesses we had: The Waverley Inn, Chumley’s, The Rienzi but not much more—few ate out in the depression.
Where Staples is now, we had Stewart’s Cafeteria and opposite, on the corner of Greenwich Avenue, was a decaying Greek diner. We ate the one-dollar spaghetti dinner accompanied by a fifty-cent glass of Cucamonga Peak wine at Momma something on 6th Avenue, and sometimes we ate at the Mother Hubbard on Sheridan Square, where you could have a luscious hamburger, apple pie, and coffee for $1.25. On Bleecker Street, we still had Italian push cart vendors.
This memory elicits another. Let’s pop over to Paris in 1949 to a table for four in an outdoor café. David Grossblatt joins our table, orders and consumes dinner. He then announces he has no money and asks could we pay his share. That same Grossblatt joins with a bunch of ex-Paris buddies to open the very first European type café in the Village—the Rienzi on Christopher Street. Then the Peacock and others follow, and the new after-the-war Village starts.
Now 48 billionaires have as much wealth as half the population of the whole country, and all the rest of the wealth seems to be sliding into their hands without their even trying—it is a very different economic world that is only getting worse.
There is no law that will halt the greatest inflation tsunami in history.
Thank god we passed Medicare 50 years ago when the need was so desperate we had too. As long as the government continues to punch up real estate taxes, we cannot pass commercial rent control—it is simply too late.
The only way to restore small business is to bring back the push cart.
