Bacon, Egg, and Cheese at The Crescent Street Deli & Grocery

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The smell of freshly made bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches wafts through the air and mingles with the rich scent of coffee that has been brewing since the crack of dawn. While waiting in line to place your order, you are blasted by a rush of cool air as the door opens every two minutes for customers rushing in to get their daily fix.

“I’ll have a bacon, egg, and cheese.” That is the phrase that cook, Javier Gomez, hears about 50 times daily while working the grill. Jorge Domingo, his partner behind the counter, works with him brewing fresh coffee to be paired off with the breakfast sandwiches.

Crescent Deli & Grocery, located at the intersection of Newtown Avenue and Crescent Street is the ideal stop to get your morning started in Astoria, Queens. The Deli & Grocery store hours are the same for every day of the week, opening at 5:00AM and closing at 11:00PM.

Basher “Tommy” Hassan co-owns the Crescent Street Deli & Grocery with his brother, Mohammed “Mo” Hassan. The brothers have lived in Astoria for an average of 20 years and have owned the deli for about ten years. They decided that opening up a Deli & Grocery business would be a great way to build something together and spend time together.

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Bashar “Tommy” Hassan

“We wanted to be our own bosses” Tommy said, naming it as one of the driving factors for opening the deli & grocery. Tommy, being the more social brother out of the pair, mostly handles customer relations behind the counter while Mo handles the behind-the-scenes processes such as restocking and employee management.

The Hassan brother’s Crescent Deli & Grocery happens to be very popular even though it is not located on a main road in the neighborhood. It is, however, right across the street from an all girls Catholic high school, a Catholic church, and many neighboring apartment buildings. Teachers and students from the school and many of nearby residents are the primary customers for the Hassan brothers. The Hassan brothers have so recently become merchants on Grubhub and Seamless, allowing for customers to have their orders delivered to them–an advancement that has been greatly helping their business.

“I always order a bacon, egg, and cheese,” comments high school teacher, Lauren Fromberg as she waits to place her order with Javier. “It never gets old. And the service here is always great!”

Lauren Fromberg is one of many that starts her morning with a stop at Crescent Deli & Grocery before heading across the street to start her day as an English teacher. It is also impossible for her to avoid running into students, since many of the girls like to stop by to buy chips and other snacks before class. Tommy also mentioned that he and Mo sometimes provide catering for early morning teacher’s meetings as well, making the Catholic school one of their biggest customers.

“It’s always the busiest in the morning, from about 7AM up until late 10AM. Everyone’s rushing in and we’ve all got to keep up.” Mo says as he restocks bottles of orange juice into the refrigerator shelf. “It’s always an adrenaline rush every morning, working to keep up with our customers.”

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Competition lurks just up the block in the form of a C-Town supermarket where sales and discounts are never rare. The grocery prices at C-Town are definitely lower than the prices at the Crescent Deli and Grocery and the Hassan brothers simply cannot compete with prices that low. However, the Hassan brothers do have an advantage over C-Town with Grubhub and Seamless. While C-Town does not deliver groceries or food, the Hassan brother’s have an advantage in being the one vendor in the residential area that can serve their clients by bringing the products and food they desire right to their door.

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Tommy explains that he and Hassan try to offer more than just food in order to keep up with their competition, the C-Town supermarket on the next block. Aside from having an aisle dedicated to potato chips, hostess pastries, and other packaged foods, the deli also offers a selection of personal items such as toothpaste, soap, and even laundry detergents. In some ways, they have become a “one stop” destination by offering a wide assortment of items so that customers can get everything they need from their store.

“You’d be surprised about what some people buy.” Tommy smiles, commenting on his customers buying patterns. “Some would order breakfast, and then also purchase a bottle of shampoo or bottle of cleaning product.”

The C-Town located just up the block does have much more foot traffic than the Crescent Street Deli & Grocery, however, there does not seem to be as much of connection between customers and cashiers. Customers pace the aisles of the store, grabbing what they need and not interacting much with store employees as they move beside them.

Cashier Sarah Ali has worked at C-Town for a couple of months while attending classes part time at LaGuardia Community College in the neighboring town of Long Island City. She comments that when working at C-Town, she “just tries to have each customer checked out as fast as possible.”

It’s clear that even though C-Town does drive more traffic, Crescent Street Deli & Grocery has been able to stay alive through their connections to their customers. It is their faithful, everyday customers that help their business to stay grounded.

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Although the location of the Deli & Grocery definitely does not get nearly as much foot track as it would if it was located just two blocks over on 30th Avenue, it is strategic enough in that it attracts many customers from the nearby high school, and residents from the apartment buildings before they rush over to the train station on 30th Avenue.

When asked about the competition at hand, Tommy simply shrugs and says, “Competition will always be there, it’s just something to keep you motivated to work harder each day.”

They strongly believe that they are able to keep up with the competition by offering deli and grocery items as well as a heaping side of very personalized service for their daily customers.

“I see these guys everyday,” says construction worker Bill Lombardi. “They know my order so well–they always ask me if I want ‘the usual’”

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What keeps the Hassan brother’s business stays alive through the strong friendships and ties built with their frequent customers.

Where I Came From- A.J Liebling

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I agree with Philip Hamburger. Liebling’s Back Where I Came From is like a double edged sword. Bittersweet yet tangy, honest yet jokey, lovely yet dreadful. He does not hold back and pushes the envelope and includes  pain with a mixture of sarcasm and wit. Liebling loves his city, but he isn’t afraid to call problems out. He isn’t afraid to expose the agony that comes with living in such a big city. I love how Leibling compares the city to a “complicated Renaissance clock” or when he says “A man lives on a street until the mayoralty grows over him like patina.” These statements  are examples of how fast and forgetful NYC can really be.

 

Liebling

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Liebling’s “Back From Where I Came From” can be described as a love letter to New York. He uses description of New York to show this. Through his slight criticism of people and places other than New York,it is obvious that he has a fondness of the city he grew up in.  Further, he says that there is nothing better than New York and the people who live here. He profiles various New Yorkers, showing their diversity and individualism.

Where I came from

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I agree it is like a love letter. Leibling expresses how he feels about New York. He compares it to places his friends travels and feels like no other places has the same quality. It’s just not New York. He talks about the people, saying New York women are the most beautiful in the world. As a reporter the technique he used was chronological. He told us the history of him living there, of his dad living there as well. The business his father owned and of the origin of the dialect locals spoke.

Lucy Dawind

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Midtown West is a region representative of New York’s Fashion Capital, and is referred to by many by its sobriquet, the “Garment District”. With world-class fashion schools like Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology just a 15 minutes subway ride away, the ubiquity of buttons, ribbons, and fashion stores come as no surprise. As a district that houses such artistic potential, Midtown West is a virtual battleground of fabric stores. A quick Yelp search reveals over 1600 stores in the area. Amongst them, the second Yelp hit, Paron Fabric, is open seven days a week despite what seems to be a wide-spread practice to close on the weekends. The ratings reveal popular support for this store with four and a half stars out of a possible five.

Upon reading the Yelp reviews, the name of a single individual who diligently works at this fabric store popped up; Lucy Dawind. An enthusiastic yelp reviewer discribes her uncanny ability to reply comprehensively to all 100 of their questions pertaining to silk. Harboring mixed feelings between the desire to meet this knowledgeable, presumably amiable individual, and doubts about such an inordinately positive Yelp review, I headed to Paron Fabric. There, I found Dawind sitting in a cozy box on the right-hand side of the entrance door.

Dawind is a sweet 65 year-old woman from Poland, who immigrated to the United States when she was 20. Dawind claims that, while she did not have a say in the matter of her immigration, she had always aspired to move to the states. Perhaps the vision of pursuing the American Dream then and now remains unchanged. Dawind emphasizes her family’s immigration through a permanent visa with a flicker of pride. She adds that everything was better back then; there was less crime, and finding employment was not at all arduous, and purchasing items of value was not as difficult as it is today.

According to Dawind, her career in a fabric store was only an accident; she had neither been studying fashion, nor did she particularly have a strong interest in it. Dawind’s original Fabric store, one that she had devoted 20 years to since 1971, had closed as a result of massive urban development. ”They used to be 40 streets full of fabric, but now it’s only restaurants and hotels. NYC is catering to tours not to fabric”, she says. At the first fabric store, she studied the intricacies of the various fabrics. This required mind-numbing amounts of time devoted to memorizing fabric types, but her persistence paid off. She started working at Paron Fabric, where she has now spent 25 years; “I like working in the Fashion Capital of New York, that’s why I’m here so many years. But I don’t know if it still is.”

Dawind claims that her “Fashion Capital New York” is gradually disappearing. Numerous factories and fabric stores have been decimated, and many have been forced to shut down. “Made in the USA” has become a rarified, expensive logo, and the cloth manufacturing industry has shifted to China and its South East Asian neighbors. Designers began preferring cheaper fabric, and mass manufacturing of fabrics became a cultural norm; something Dawind cannot agree with. “I wish things are what they used to be, but I think that’s impossible.”

With rents rising exponentially, the survival of small stores such as these may be difficult. Even a veteran of the city such as Dawind is forced to face the harsh realities that accompany living in New York; every day, she must rely on public transport to commute from New Jersey.

Dawind says the city of New York is rife with change, and living here is like living in the world of a television drama. She was attracted to surprise, happiness as well as fear and disappointment in this city. Dawind’ favorite fabric is a natural, cool, yet diaphanous cotton, which resembles her very own personality: with its softness. This softness seems to be missing from the city that currently reaps satisfaction from its immersion in business.

Liebling Response

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I have to agree with Philip Hamburger that much like most of what we’ve read in class this semester, “Back From Where I Came From” by AJ Liebling is in deed a love letter to New York.

He describes New York as a microcosm that can function regardless of what is happening around it, and New York is even made up of multiple microcosms in itself that can function independently, as Liebling says “they live and die oblivious of the worlds around them”. They often clash with one another, and feed off of one another, but never depend on one another.

Liebling argues that there is simply no one better than the native New Yorker. No one speaks better, no one looks better (“New York women are some of the most beautiful in the world”), and while I’m not sure I can agree with those two statements, I see what Liebling is saying, that there is simply no place like New York.