NY SHOP IS REALLY IN-TENTS
But beloved 1950 ‘tarp’ newsstand now in peril
TWO years ago, Mohammad Arif Zaman plunked down $100,000 for a piece of the American Dream — a newsstand in the middle of Greenwich Village.
Originally built in 1950, the kiosk stood out not because of its selection of newspapers and magazines or because it was in a bustling neighborhood. This stand was different because, in a city of skyscrapers and stand-out architecture, Zaman’s business was located in a tent.
A forest-green tent, to be precise, with wooden poles holding up the waterproof tarp smack dab in the middle of the big city.
While the tent looks temporary, as if it were erected by an ambitious Boy Scout troop, it has outlasted buildings and businesses that came after its arrival, including Crazy Eddie, J&R Music, Pathmark, Border Books, Tower Records and Gray’s Papaya.
They’re all gone — but the tent remains.
“The building has been there since forever,” Zaman told The Post.
Standing on Sixth Avenue near the busy Eighth Street intersection, the 15foot long tent was around when Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg roamed the Village.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, the PulitzerPrize winning author of “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” would frequent the tent, according to Suraj Shelly, 40, the son of the previous operator, who had worked the counter there from the time he was 12.
“I ran into [Goodwin] a few months ago outside the place, and we were talking about it and the history of the neighborhood and the place itself,” Shelly said.
“She mentioned that her first article that was printed in The New York Times, she bought her copy at the newsstand.”
THE idea behind the tent — like many sidewalk newsstands — was to give jobs to vets coming home from World War II.
“They were all at one time owned by veterans that came back,” Shelly said. “The statute still stands. Veterans can come back and get vendor licenses fairly easily from the city, and that was born out of, from what I know, World War II.”
Just as interesting as the green tarp’s ability to survive all these decades is what’s underneath the tent.
Squeeze pass the ice-cream freezer to get behind the counter and you realize there is barely room for two people to stand.
At your feet, a wooden pallet covers a staircase that leads to a basement filled with cans of Pringles chips, Snapples, and bottles of Naked Juices past their use-by date.
Another staircase leads to a subbasement that looks like a set from a horror movie. A small black couch has been turned into a makeshift bed, and old pieces of plywood are strewn in one corner. Through an opening, one can see an old computer with some kind of spreadsheet on the monitor behind a locked door.
On a far wall there are two sets of lockers, and behind them, according to one of the workers giving the tour, is a secret entrance to the Sixth Avenue subway line.
“In the ’80s you could actually access part of the station through that wall,” Shelly recalls. “It was like a cloak-and-dagger walkway. If you pick your way through a couple of doors, you end up at the service entrance onto the platform.”
BUT the tent is not without its controversy.
Neighbors complain that it’s taking up too much of the sidewalk.
One business that’s kvetching is Hao Noodle and Tea by Madam Zhu’s Kitchen, the first New York restaurant from superstar Chinese chef Zhu Rong, which is set to open next door at 401 Sixth.
The space had been empty for almost two years, since the lease for Gobo’s, an upscale vegetarian restaurant, ran out.
“Our tenant just [questioned] if they have to extend that far out [into the sidewalk],” said Ernest Faraci, the di-