Living where they also work
A once-common housing arrangement is being sustained by a whole new generation of New Yorkers
Paul Longo was pretty sure that the landlord for a vacant apartment above Ida’s Nearabout, a bar in the Sunnyside neighborhood in the borough of Queens, would have trouble finding a tenant. Valiantly, he signed on.
Living above a business that has very long hours and very loud patrons is not for everyone, but Longo, now 38, was up to the challenge. After all, he’s a co-owner of Ida’s, a 6-year-old neighborhood hangout with a version of the Southwest chain’s In-N-Out burger on the menu and a stuffed wolf named Ida mounted behind the bar.
Who could be more inured to the sound of latenight merrymakers than a guy who runs a bar? And if, four years on, the din sometimes gets to be a bit much, what are the odds that Longo is going to make an irate phone call at 3 a.m. to complain?
He’s among New Yorkers who are reinvigorating the old but now largely abandoned custom of living above the store.
“For centuries, in rural and urban settings, it was the common thing around the world for people to live and work in the same place,” said Howard Davis, a professor of architecture at the University of Oregon and author of the book “Living Over the Store: Architecture and Local Urban Life.”
Fables and the Poseidon
In 1950, Michael and Menina Anagnostou bought a five-story tenement on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen for the Poseidon Greek Bakery, a business founded by Michael Anagnostou’s father, Demetrios, in 1923, and long celebrated for its baklava, spanakopita
and tiropita (cheese-filled phyllo triangles), among other treats. Anagnostou, his wife and her three children from a previous marriage lived on the third floor and served as landlords to a handful of tenants.
Then in 1960, Anagnostou’s stepson, Anthony Fable, married Lili Cornella, and the newlyweds settled into a second-floor apartment.
A few years later, when the last of the tenants left the building, the family was able to spread out. Lili Fable, now a widow, has the second and third floor. Her son Paul Fable, the only one of her three children to join the business, lives on the top two floors with his wife and two children.
“We once looked at buying a house in New Jersey, but then we said,
‘No, we don’t want this.’ It
just wasn’t in our interest to move,” Lili Fable said.
As a child, Paul Fable likely viewed the matter differently. When, at the age of 7, he was finally given clearance to walk to school by himself, he crossed the street against the light. A neighbor took note of the infraction, “and called me to tell me that a cab had almost hit him,” Lili Fable recalled. When he got home that day, she recalled, “I dressed him down and said, ‘Well, I guess I have to keep walking you to school,’ and he asked, ‘Do you have spies on me?’ ”
It seems that she did. “Everybody knew us because we lived above the bakery,” Lili Fable said. “It would have been different if we lived somewhere else.”
‘Something is wrong’
In 1999, Jim Lahey, the
founder of Sullivan Street Bakery, shifted operations from lower Manhattan to a leased space on the ground floor of a building in Hell’s Kitchen.
When, in 2009, the building’s owners decided to sell the property, the bakery bought it, and Lahey moved in upstairs. His girlfriend, Maya Joseph, joined him there in 2011, and they married in 2015. The couple now share the five-bedroom space with their three children, a dog and a snake.
“Some days,” Joseph said, “it really feels as if we live in a little village. We know the mail lady and the UPS guy. And people definitely know who to complain to: They stop us and ask when we’re going to start serving soup again.
“People always know where we are,” said Joseph, 44. “It’s hard to distance ourselves from work. We have to leave town or leave the state.”
But if there’s a problem related to the store, it’s good to be near at hand. “A lot of bakery crises happen at night,” said Joseph, who is well-versed in the rhythms of the kitchen and who knows when the rhythms are off. “If I hear loud music, that’s a good thing because it means that the workers are happy and in their groove,” she said. “That music is like a lullaby.”
But hearing an oven alarm, which means the bread should have been removed from the oven, is a wake-up call. “It makes me wonder what is preventing our bakers from getting the bread out,” Joseph said. “If I don’t smell bread at night, which is when we do our baking, I know something is wrong.”
Below the loft
When Maria Gonzalez moved to Manhattan from Mexico City at the age of 19, she had two goals: to make a little money, then make her way to Europe. Although she knew nothing about mixing drinks, she got a job as a bartender and then as a server before wearying of the hospitality business and becoming a florist.
In 2008, Gonzalez moved from Chelsea to East Harlem, where the rents were more manageable.
Through the friend of a friend, she lucked into a loft sublet, subsequently taking over the lease.
When she sold the flower shop she owned on Third Avenue and 31st Street, her thoughts turned back to the food service business.
She had always cooked for friends on her days off, “so opening a restaurant was what I thought I could do,” said Gonzalez, who is now 60.
After working as a server for a decade to raise the capital to open her own place, she found the perfect location: the storefront below the loft she shares with her partner, Lou Martins.
Bistro Casa Azul, which serves what Gonzalez calls “elevated Mexican food,” opened four years ago.
“The space had been a social club. It was rundown and didn’t have a good reputation, and we made it beautiful,” Gonzalez said.
“When I first came to the neighborhood, people helped me carry my stuff upstairs,” Gonzalez said. “I felt welcome here even before I opened the restaurant. I feel a closeness, and not to sound silly, a love. And I had never before felt that with neighbors in all the years I’ve lived in New York. I would feel that way even if I didn’t live above my business. I just think it’s more intense because I do.”