They didn't lose their lives on September 11, but they did lose businesses and customers. Hundreds of millions of dollars that were supposed to have come to their rescue haven't materialized. The owners of small businesses close to the World Trade Center feel abandoned, bitter, and betrayed.
Letter From Ground Zero
What a difference five blocks can make. The New York City neighborhood where I live, Tribeca, sits immediately north of the site of the former World Trade Center. A funky blend of rambling old loft buildings and modern apartment houses, this onetime artists' haven has over the years been invaded by expensive restaurants, art galleries, and European furniture stores.
After September 11, resilient local businesses joined together to create special weekend discount offers designed to lure the city's patriotic shoppers to Lower Manhattan. Local resident Robert De Niro encouraged his Hollywood friends to crowd our restaurants; in the spring, with American Express's help, he hosted a multimillion-dollar film festival that filled our streets with generous and fat-walleted citizens. Although business isn't uniformly back to where it was before September 11, suffice it to say I can no longer get into my favorite restaurants without a reservation.
But walk five blocks south, and it's a strikingly different story. Most of the pedestrians you encounter aren't shoppers; they're construction workers sporting luminous orange safety vests and hard hats plastered with American-flag decals. Try to cross a street, and you'll find yourself dodging a bulldozer or a police car. The air is thick with dust as workers dig up streets to lay a tangle of new electric, gas, telephone, and water lines.
Lower Manhattan is not entirely a commercial wasteland. Some office buildings are beginning to fill up again as large companies take advantage of millions of dollars in financial incentives for moving employees to the area. Critical subway stations have reopened. And there are, of course, thousands of people making pilgrimages to the World Trade Center site, some out of true deference to the tragic event, others seemingly in a mawkish display of tourist bravado.
But if you're a small business near Ground Zero, you have not enjoyed the community rejuvenation of Tribeca nor the adoption of the Hollywood set. And that's where the government comes in -- or, at least, that's where it was supposed to come in.
After September 11, President George W. Bush grandly announced his intention to spend $21 billion to restore New York City to its former glory. Of the $2.7 billion appropriated so far by Congress, $500 million was earmarked for small businesses, individuals, and nonprofit organizations that suffered economic losses from 9/11. But for a host of reasons, many of the small businesses that were most directly affected by the attack on the World Trade Center have received little or no financial aid.
Consider Mike Yagudayev, a Russian émigré turned American citizen who bought a hair salon just across from the site several years ago. Nine months after 9/11, he is still unable to reopen his salon, which is located on the ground floor of a building that has yet to be cleaned. Using a formula based on a percentage of last year's sales, the government has told Yagudayev that he is eligible for a grant of only $1,975. The initial payment was just $591; not until May did he receive the remaining $1,384. "My blood pressure goes up every time I talk about this," he says.
"Government agencies have decimated me much more than the terrorists did."
--Seth Pehr
Or how about Lisa Chapman, whose four-person design and marketing firm, ChapmanWorks, was situated in a glorious 21st-floor office overlooking the World Trade Center. The building caught fire that morning and still sits shrouded in tarpaulins and netting while the owner tries to decide whether to tear it down or restore it. In the days following the attack, Chapman moved her office to temporary quarters in Chelsea but has since returned downtown to share space with another displaced business. There she is trying to re-create from scratch the work her firm had previously done for such clients as Xerox, Canon, and Cushman & Wakefield. Though her firm enjoyed some $600,000 in billings in 2000, the government has determined that she should get just $10,000 to cover her losses. So far she has received only the first $2,500 of that amount. "The grant and loan programs have been woefully inadequate," she says.
Seth Pehr is a third-generation locksmith whose business was at Five World Trade Center, part of a collection of buildings so damaged that they were later pulled down. He lost his business in its entirety and was given only a total of 75 minutes in mid-October and the beginning of November to retrieve business records and personal items belonging to his father. To date Pehr has received a grand total of $4,100 from the government. He applied for unemployment insurance and was approved. But when it came time to renew his application, three months later, he was turned down. The reason: he admitted that he was not looking for a job because he was trying to restart his business. "Government agencies have decimated me much more than the terrorists did," says an angry and shaken Pehr.
Many of these small-business owners are angry not only about the amount of aid they have received but also about the government's almost Orwellian logic in determining how the money will be doled out.
Monica Anderson, co-owner of a commercial-film-production company called Black Watch Productions, learned that her company was ineligible for a so-called Small Firm Attraction and Retention Grant because her business was too small. Congress had mandated that the $80-million program focus on companies that have fewer than 200 employees but more than 10. That essentially ruled out large segments of Lower Manhattan's small-business population.
Leonard Altabet, an optician who has had a store in the neighborhood for 24 years, made the mistake of collecting disaster unemployment insurance for the five and a half weeks he was closed last fall. Now the state is taking him to court to get that money back on the grounds that he was a corporate officer of the company he owns and therefore was still working during that period. "It amounted to $1,800 at a time when life as I knew it had ended," says Altabet. "How sick is this? We all should be getting disaster unemployment insurance. All my employees got it, and if I went out of business, I would have gotten it."
All the bureaucratic nonsense might have been tolerable, owners say, if the city had been able to restore their businesses' services. But for months these entrepreneurs have struggled to reestablish their companies in an environment almost unimaginably inhospitable. Many were without electricity or phone service for weeks. They could get in and out of the area only with the utmost difficulty. In order to get their mail -- often full of critical information about their accounts -- they had to stand in line for hours at a post office several miles away, on 33rd Street. Worst of all, their local customer base, particularly vital to retail businesses, was shy by the 100,000 or so people whose companies or homes had been dislocated by the disaster. In December, when Pasquale "Pat" di Tillio reopened his Majestic Pizza on a block cordoned off at both ends by police barricades, his new target market was rescuers and his main customer was the Salvation Army -- a far cry from the brisk traffic he had enjoyed before. "How many people want to show a photo I.D. for a slice of pizza?" he asks plaintively.
