4 SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020
Tracking an Outbreak
0 NRancho with his parents and brothers.
His father, Felix, left Mexico for the
United States at 13 by himself, eventually
moving to New York and working his
way up in the food industry, from dish-
washer to head chef of a restaurant in
Chelsea.
The family opened the butcher shop
about five years ago cater-corner from a
Key Food supermarket. But El Rancho
specializes in cuts of beef and pork not
found at most grocers, like tripe, al pas-
tor, cecina (salted beef ) and longaniza, a
sausage similar to chorizo.
Even after El Rancho reopened, many
customers could not afford the groceries
or use food stamps. The store’s food
stamp permit expired during the pan-
demic, and it could not file for a renewal
until recently because of the shutdown,
Dennis Soriano said.
Since May, the store has yet to make a
profit, he said. In recent weeks, the
store’s expenses soared when pork and
beef prices skyrocketed. A weekly order
of meat and groceries to stock the store,
which typically cost $1,500, jumped to as
much as $4,000. Prices have since
started to return to normal, he said.
The family did not want anyone to
leave hungry, so El Rancho has extended
informal lines of credit to customers, to-
taling about $8,000 a month Mr. Soriano
said. The store has given away boxes of
produce and meat to about 450 families.The roots of one store on the block ex-
tend to Mexico, from where a 13-year-old
boy left for the United States decades ago
and found his footing in the food industry.
A drugstore is owned by a pharmacist
lured to the neighborhood from the Mid-
west by an acquaintance. Another shop
is run by a man from the Dominican Re-
public who began working there nearly
30 years ago
Now these storefronts in the 4400
block of Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park,
Brooklyn, a collection of restaurants, bo-
degas and mom-and-pop shops largely
run by immigrants, are in many ways
emblematic of the toll the coronavirus
pandemic has taken on New York’s small
businesses.
Nearly 90 percent of the city’s restau-
rants and bars paid none or only part of
their May rent, according to a survey by
the New York City Hospitality Alliance, a
business group. Nearly two-thirds of
ground-floor commercial tenants, from
bodegas to nail salons to boutiques, did
not pay rent in May and June, according
to the Community Housing Improve-
ment Program, which represents thou-
sands of property owners.
As the city reopens, many mom-and-
pop shops will not return, while others
are struggling to survive.
Bay Ridge French Cleaners
The conveyor of clothes at Bay Ridge
French Cleaners is a time capsule from
March 14, its last full day of business.
Pressed button-down shirts hang in
plastic bags. Hemmed jeans wait for
their owners. About the only items being
cleaned nowadays are police uniforms.
The pandemic has turned the econ-
omy upside down. Dry cleaners were al-
lowed to remain open as “essential” busi-
nesses, but at the same time, they were
less essential than ever.
For more than three months, working
professionals have traded their collared
shirts, dresses and suits for comfortable
work-from-home attire. If a customer
does show up, it’s usually to say hello.
“The situation is really, really, really
bad,” said Alex, 52, the owner, who
started working at the front counter in
1992, a few years after he immigrated to
the United States from the Dominican
Republic. He asked that his last name not
be published.
When Alex turns on the conveyor and
watches clothes swing by, he is reminded
of the lost income. Customers do not pay
until they pick up.
On a recent afternoon, he pulled a plas-
tic bag off the rack and placed it on the
counter: Three tailored pants for a man
named Victor. He died from the coro-
navirus, Alex said.
Bay Ridge French Cleaners was
started by an immigrant from Cuba in
1980, and Alex bought the cleaners and
the entire building in 2004.
The business has never made Alex
particularly wealthy — he is the only full-
time employee — but he made enough
over the years to buy a three-story home
for his family about 150 feet from the
store.
The shop had been in decline for years,
he said, as office workers who had lived
in the neighborhood retired or moved.
The new residents, he said, cannot afford
to have items dry cleaned as often and, in
a sign of modern work culture, they in-
creasingly wear clothes that can be
washed at home.
Alex said he has spent the past months
thinking a lot about the future of Bay
Ridge French Cleaners. If he did not own
the property, he said, he would have had
to close it long ago because of rising
rents. A vacant storefront down the
street is for lease for about $8,000 a
month.
“I have no choice right now,” Alex said
about keeping the store open. “But if I
had the chance, I would close.”
El Rancho Nuevo Supermarket
When the pandemic erupted in New
York in March, the Soriano family made
the difficult decision to shut down its
butcher and grocery store for all of April.
A relative, as well as friends, had died of
the virus, and the family worried about
its spread.
A month’s worth of income vanished.
The store, which reopened in May, has
not recovered. The employees’ sched-
ules have been cut back. The staff of five
butchers has been reduced to three. And
the store now closes at 7 p.m. — not at 9,
as it had before — because the former
rush of customers has disappeared.
“A lot of the community is out a job,”
said Dennis Soriano, 27, who owns El
“It’s a special block,” he said. “It’s a
special community. And it’s built by im-
migrants.”VLS Pharmacy
In 1984, Gopesh Patel bought a one-way
ticket from Chicago to La Guardia Air-
port and hopped in a car for Sunset Park.
It was his first time in New York City. At
the corner of Fifth Avenue and 44th
Street, Dr. Patel met a friend of a friend
who had bought a drugstore there.
“He handed me the keys and said, ‘You
got to run this store,’ ” recalled Dr. Patel,
who grew up in India and moved to the
United States in 1980. “We didn’t know
each other that well, but we always be-
lieved in trust.”
Since then, VLS Pharmacy has trans-
formed from a neighborhood store into a
pharmacy that ships to 20 states and has
a state-of-the-art sterile compounding
lab, a rarity in mom-and-pop drugstores.
But all that seemed at risk in March.
In an instant, customers stopped shop-
ping its aisles and picking up their medi-
cine. Masks, gloves and hand sanitizer
flew off the shelves. New supplies were
harder to come by. Shipments to
customers were delayed.
There was a personal toll, too. Over the
weeks, 25 longtime customers died from
the virus, Dr. Patel said. In late March,
Dr. Patel himself contracted the virus
and went into quarantine for two weeks.Through it all, Dr. Patel pledged to his
staff, which had grown to 25 workers
from just four in 1984, that no one would
be let go. “Not in the pandemic and not
ever,” he said.
In recent weeks, business has picked
up. The pharmacy started manufactur-
ing a hand sanitizer in its lab and in-
creased delivery of prescription medica-
tion so customers did not have to venture
outside. But the number of customers
who go to the store, which makes up a
majority of the company’s business, is
not what it used to be.
“People are afraid to come out,” Dr. Pa-
tel said, “so it’s becoming very difficult.”Tony’s Park Barber Shop
The barber shop has stood on the block
for decades. Today it is shuttered, not be-
cause of the pandemic, but because Fe-
lice Garofalo decided it was time to call it
quits. Still, an empty storefront will most
likely be harder to fill.
Mr. Garofalo moved from his family’s
home in Italy when he was about 15 and
skipped around Europe, cutting hair for a
living in Germany, Switzerland and else-
where. In 1963, he landed in Brooklyn
and soon took a job at the Park Barber
Shop, which locals say opened about a
century ago.
Mr. Garofalo charged less than $1 for a
haircut. His customers were also immi-
grants, mostly Scandinavians who hadsettled in Sunset Park.
Mr. Garofalo bought the barbershop in
the late 1960s, started going by Tony (no
one could pronounce Felice) and barely
raised prices; a haircut today costs $10.
The neighborhood is still filled with
immigrants, but now they are from the
Dominican Republic and other parts of
Latin America.
At 84, Mr. Garofalo decided in early
March to retire so he could care for his
wife, who has cancer. His family had
begged him for years to hang up his
shears. He would not budge.
“My father just loved that neighbor-
hood,” said his son Joseph Garofalo, who
worked alongside his father on week-
ends for about 16 years. “He learned to
speak Spanish fluently. He speaks better
Spanish than Italian right now.”
Joseph Garofalo said his father’s re-
tirement was fortuitously timed. Barber-
shops and salons would be closed for
weeks and were only allowed to resume
business on Monday, when the city en-
tered the second phase of its reopening.
Mr. Garofalo, whose father owns the
building, said that the family is not in a
rush to clear out the shop, which features
oversized barber chairs and teal cab-
inets, or to take down the faded sign out
front.
“It’s extremely sad for us,” Mr. Garo-
falo said. “It was time, but it’s definitely
bittersweet.”A dry cleaner on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. With more workers ditching suits and dresses for sweatpants, the shop, like many in the area, is struggling to get by.PHOTOGRAPHS BY ISMAIL FERDOUS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESDr. Gopesh Patel has vowed not to lay off his workers at VLS Pharmacy. El Rancho Nuevo Supermarket has extended credit to its customers.ECONOMIC FALLOUT
On One Block
In Brooklyn,
A City’s Toll
In Plain View
By MATTHEW HAAGAlain Delaquérière contributed research.