Small Business Story

When I was going to graduate school at NYU, we lived in Astoria, just one block off of 30th Avenue. Our landlords had come from Genoa, Italy when they were in their twenties. In the thirties, they opened a restaurant around the corner. They went broke because they couldn't not feed friends who were broke. This story in today's New York Times tells the story of today's hard times for small businesses. Notice the role that government intervention plays in some of the stories.

A Small-Business Barometer in Astoria
By FERNANDA SANTOS

Marino & Sons Fish Market opened on 30th Avenue in Astoria, Queens, in 1932, fulfilling the dreams of a scrawny teenager from Sicily who had been peddling fish from woven baskets along the streets of Manhattan.

The fishmonger, Baldasarre Marino, and then a son, a grandson and a great-grandson — all named Charles — kept the market alive through the Great Depression, the 1970s fiscal crisis and the blackout of 2006. But the great recession proved to be too much, and the market closed in July, suffering the fate of some neighboring small businesses, like a pub run by a man from Ireland and a carpet store owned by a man from Greece.

“There’s no insurance against a bad economy,” said Charlie Marino, a great-grandson of the fish market’s founder.

But along with endings there have been beginnings. Last month, an eyewear shop opened in a spot where rolls of carpets were once stacked. Three doors from the fish market, a Louisiana-style restaurant is set to open soon, while across the street, a shuttered lounge has resurfaced as a Latin restaurant.

And so this small commercial stretch — eight blocks of 30th Avenue, bracketed by 31st Street and Steinway Street — is a microcosm of how small businesses are faring as the economy flails.

A street that has long been an incubator of financial hopes and aspirations for waves of immigrants has fallen victim to high rents and disappearing customers. But this strip also has a resilient streak, a history of newcomers arriving with an entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to work hard and take a chance.

Wall Street may be the economic lifeblood of New York City, but it is small businesses, places with 100 workers or less, that are the city’s backbone, accounting for 98 percent of its roughly 233,000 companies, according to the state’s Department of Labor.

Even at the height of the recession in 2008, small businesses provided nearly half of all private-sector jobs available in the city, more than they did in 1990, a study to be released by the Center for an Urban Future, a research institute, found. “Small businesses are the only ones that have been taking chances,” said Jonathan Bowles, the center’s director.

Still, the struggles of neighborhood businesses are underscored by persistently high retail vacancy rates. Nowhere is the problem more pronounced than in Queens, which logged a vacancy rate of 13 percent in the third quarter of this year, the highest in the city, according to Marcus & Millichap, a national brokerage firm. Manhattan had the lowest vacancy rate, about 7 percent. In the third quarter two years ago, the vacancy rates were 4 percent for Queens and 2.8 percent for Manhattan.

A survey this summer by Representative Anthony D. Weiner painted a dismal picture in several shopping districts in Queens, finding more than one in 5 stores closed along a busy stretch of Jamaica Avenue that runs through Richmond Hill and Woodhaven, and one in 10 stores closed in Glendale. On Woodhaven Boulevard in Rego Park, almost 20 percent of storefronts were closed.

“This is more than an economic indicator,” Mr. Weiner, a Democrat who represents parts of Queens and Brooklyn, said in an interview. “It’s a sort of psychic barometer of a community.”

In Astoria, about 30 mom-and-pop stores along 30th Avenue have gone out of business in the past two years, in what has been of the most unforgiving financial times for a strip that has experienced booms and busts along with successive waves of immigrants.

Greeks and Italians arrived at the turn of the last century and opened butcher shops and salumerias that sold prosciutto, pancetta and racks of lamb.

Croatians followed, and then Czechs and other Eastern Europeans, who favored travel agencies and hair salons. More recently, Brazilians opened restaurants, and Arabs started jewelry stores. Now, in a reckless gamble or an act of faith, a fresh crop of business owners is trying to make it on the avenue.

For Annie Zhu, 31, and Michelle Ho, 35, friends and partners in the optical shop, Vision Essential, failure would probably mean having to go back to working for someone else.

For Al Lau, 39, and his wife, Michele Addeo, 38, the owners of the Louisiana-style restaurant, Sugarfreak, it would probably mean losing everything they have.

Mr. Lau and Ms. Addeo signed the lease on the 1,000-square-foot space a year ago and have been paying rent ever since, though their landlord agreed to charge them $3,000 a month, half of what they will be paying once the restaurant opens. The discount is welcome, but it does little to lessen their problems.

The couple applied for small-business loans, but banks turned them down, saying that restaurants were too risky, Mr. Lau said.

They have run through their savings — Mr. Lau is a lawyer and Ms. Addeo is a physical therapist — and hit the limit on their credit cards to finance their restaurant, which is not yet finished. They spent $150,000 on kitchen equipment and $25,000 on lawyers after a neighborhood group opposed their application for a liquor license. (The restaurant has been granted a provisional license.)

The store’s wood floor was rotten, and it took two months to get the necessary permit to replace it, then an additional five months and $20,000 to replace a pipe connecting a water main to the restaurant.

They are now waiting for a final inspection while applying the finishing touches. On a recent morning, their contractor arrived with a big chandelier that will hang over the bar.

“At this point, we’re too far into it to turn back,” Mr. Lau said. “But we’re going to give it a shot.”

“And it’s going to work out,” Ms. Addeo added. “Hopefully.”

To open their eyewear shop on 30th Avenue, Ms. Zhu and Ms. Ho relied on a loan and a little luck. Because of the poor economy, Prada and Versace, which would ordinarily not do business with a small neighborhood store in Queens, were eager to sell to them. And though the two women quit their jobs to devote themselves full time to their business, their husbands did not.

“Everybody needs eyeglasses,” said Ms. Ho, who was born in China, grew up in Hong Kong and moved to New York in 1997.

Ms. Zhu, whose parents came from China, added, “The big question for us is, are people going to buy a $100 frame or a $300 frame?”

Their landlord, George Georgiou, 70, who ran the carpet store for 30 years, had many good years. He bought the building that housed his store — ground-floor space with apartments above — and a similar one nearby. He also bought a home in the neighborhood, and he put both his children through law school.

But business eventually slowed so much that it made no sense to stay open.

“Economy hard,” Mr. Georgiou said. “More hard and more competition to do business today.”

Mr. Marino, of the fish market, also owns the building where his store was, but for now he is trying to figure out what to do with all the equipment he still has there, while keeping going the wholesale fish business he has had on the side.

The other day, Mr. Georgiou stopped by the grand opening for his tenants’ store and offered Ms. Zhu and Ms. Ho simple advice.

“When I come to America, the way to make more money is the business way,” Mr. Georgiou told them. “Own your business still good; better than work for somebody else.”