Henry Street Settlement Community Day fun for all
BY TEQUILA MINSKY
On Aug. 28, popcorn, cotton candy,
ring toss and other games along
with a magic show and story
telling ruled the afternoon for the Henry
Street Settlement Community Day that
brought out children and their parents and
neighbors of all ages for a day of relaxation
and fun.
Local politicians including Boro President
Gale Brewer, Congresswoman Nydia
Velasquez and City Councilman-elect Chris
Marte made an appearance.
Tables spread out along the closed street
offered information about the many programs
Henry Street Settlement offers. A
wheel-of-fortune spinner provided chances
at favors and masks were given out.
This settlement house has a long and
proud history having begun in the late
1800s to offer health care to the industrial
poor immigrants of the neighborhood.
Over the years the service to the neighborhood
has broadened.
Henry Street hosts a broad swath of
The “Magic Man” performing his routine to a captive audience.
programs that serve pre-schoolers to
seniors. Education, sports and recreation,
senior services, health and wellness, transitional
and supportive housing and employment
are among the services Henry Street
offers the Lower East Side.
PHOTO BY TEQUILA MINSKY
Their ATTAIN (Advanced Technology
Training and Information Networking)
laboratory offers free access to the Internet
and free computer training to members
of the community. Due to COVID, these
Lab classes are being held virtually at the
present time. Other Henry Street programs
are also being conducted on-line.
Henry Street Settlement’s commitment
to the arts is apparent with its Abrons Arts
Center on Grand Street built in 1975. Adjacent
to its national landmark the Harry
De Jur Playhouse, Abrons presents performances,
exhibitions, educational programs
and residencies.
A home for contemporary interdisciplinary
arts in this Lower East Side neighborhood, the
Abrons Center is a core program of Henry
Street that believes that access to the arts is
essential to a free and healthy society.
Spirits were not dampened during Saturday’s
overcast—rain threatened but did not
occur—day. Folks were inspired to dance
by DJ Tra$e who kept the beat going all
afternoon and rocked Henry Street with
his 80s and 90s musical mash-ups.
The mid-afternoon performance from
Daso El Afro Caribeno Band —that’s Afro
Latin Caribbean soul—provided the pure
joy which comes with live melodies and
rhythms. The band’s cello adds even greater
dimension to its feet stomping Latin sound.
NYC college neighborhood businesses
eagerly await return of students
BY ARIA VELAZQUEZ
THE CITY
Back-to-school sales have
never been so crucial.
While virtual learning
kept students and staff at the
city’s colleges safely apart, the
separation also took a toll on
nearby retailers that relied on an
economic boost at the beginning
of every semester and foot traffi c
throughout the school year.
Now some of those business
owners say their hopes to make
it out of the pandemic with some
degree of fi nancial stability are
riding on an academic return to
normal — even as COVID stubbornly
refuses to disappear.
Since March 2020, the Book
Culture store on Broadway
and West 114th Street, near
Columbia University, has been
far quieter than the staff would
have liked.
“We’ve always had very busy
stores,” said store manager Cody
Madsen said, referring to Book
Culture’s two locations in Morningside
Heights and one in Long
Island City, Queens.
That foot traffic dwindled
during the pandemic. In 2020,
“Something like 40% of our sales
were online,” Madsen said. “Now
it’s kind of leveled out to around
15% online.”
It Takes The Village
For Deep Patel and Karn
Deshmukh, an infl ux of NYU
students is crucial for their new
restaurant to gain traction. The
two 28-year-olds from Jersey City
co-own Ambo, a quick-service
Indian restaurant similar to
Chipotle on East 8th Street near
Washington Square Park.
The partners selected the location
for Ambo, which opened
earlier this summer, with hopes it
would attract a mix of Greenwich
Village residents, local retail and
offi ce workers – and NYU’s tens
of thousands of students and staff.
“So far, our customer base
is mostly residential and offi ce
workers,” Patel said. “But we
defi nitely expect to see an uptick
in business when students come
back.”
“The student influx just
started, but we haven’t seen a lot
yet,” Deshmukh added.
Ramaz Kiknadze, the owner
of Cafe Delia, a 4-month-old
Georgian restaurant a few doors
down on East 8th, is similarly
hopeful.
“We’re seeing 70% to 80%
residential customers for now, but
in September that could change,”
Kiknadze said. “Students could
be 50% of our customers.”
Kiknadze plans on using
university-specific marketing
tools to attract college kids to
the fl edgling restaurant, like advertising
in the Campus Clipper
and offering a 20% off to NYU
students and staff.
“I hope that the situation isn’t
going to change and nothing
terrible happens with COVID,”
Kiknadze said. “We need time to
establish ourselves.”
Rachel Brandon, the marketing
and events manager for the
Village Alliance, the business
improvement district that encompasses
NYU and The New School,
emphasized the importance of
students to the neighborhood’s
economic vitality.
“August can be a little empty
because the residents are gone,”
Brandon said. “Then this is the
funny period where there’s not
really summer school and we’re
waiting on that ‘after Labor Day’
state for students to come back.”
Ambo on East 8th Street near NYU is hoping for increased
business from foot traffic this fal
A New Economy
The pandemic has changed behavior,
so the return to in-person
instruction may not translate into
a full return to in-person shopping,
some observers say.
“I think most students will
continue to do their shopping
online,” said Dan O’Flaherty, an
economics professor at Columbia.
Still, local businesses “will do
better than they did last year,” he
predicted.
What the city’s overall economic
picture will look like in
even a few months or what kind of
purchasing power young people
will have this semester remains
to be seen.
“On the one hand, there’s still a
ARIA VELAZQUEZ/THE CITY
lot of unemployment,” O’Flaherty
said. “But the student-age job
market has been OK.”
That could be a positive signal
for student spending at nearby
businesses. But other factors from
the evolving COVID variants to
the weather will play a part. The
key, merchants say, is to be prepared
for the unexpected.
“If anything, we’ve learned
in the last two years that we’re
pretty dexterous,” said Madsen,
the bookstore manager.
This article was originally
published on Aug. 30 at 8:14
p.m. EDT by THE CITY, an independent,
nonprofi t news outlet
dedicated to hard-hitting reporting
that serves the people of New York.
Schneps Media September 2, 2021 3