Saving Main Street
Map
Map by Nick Springer, copyright © 2022 Springer Cartographics
Dedication
For
Daisy, Oliver, and Silas
with love
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Map of Northeastern Pennsylvania
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1:Heavy Is the Crown
Chapter 2:Governor Richie Rich
Chapter 3:Fearless
Chapter 4:The Coronavirus Comes to Hazleton
Chapter 5:Washington
Chapter 6:Preexisting Conditions
Chapter 7:The Old Forge
Chapter 8:Governor Dictator
Chapter 9:Bikini Season
Chapter 10:Family Reunion
Chapter 11:The Corner Druggist
Chapter 12:Extinction-Level Threats
Chapter 13:People Hate Us on Yelp
Chapter 14:It Takes a Village
Chapter 15:10 Percent Capacity
Chapter 16:The Fall Surge
Chapter 17:Makersville
Chapter 18:The Hammer and the Dance
Chapter 19:Starvation Mode
Chapter 20:“Surviving Long Enough to Survive”
Chapter 21:Maxed Out
Chapter 22:Wait Till Next Year
Chapter 23:Dream Small
Afterword: Onward
Acknowledgments
Notes on Sourcing
About the Author
Also by Gary Rivlin
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
January had been a terrific month inside Cusumano’s, an Italian restaurant in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, a town of eight thousand a few miles south of Scranton. The dining room was packed every weekend, despite temperatures that sometimes dipped down into the single digits. So, too, was a downstairs bar area called the Cellar. TJ Cusumano, a thickly built thirty-four-year-old, had started cooking when he was in grade school. His wife, Nina, two years his junior, had been working in restaurants since the age of sixteen. There had been moments since they first opened Cusumano’s in 2013 when the couple regretted ever getting into the restaurant business. The food was delicious, and they had the accolades to prove it. But the couple sometimes went months without drawing a salary. They lived off the tips Nina earned serving the food.
By January of 2020, though, they were drawing crowds even on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The good times continued into February. Valentine’s Day that year fell on a Friday. The restaurant had probably its best Friday night in its seven-plus years of operation, making for a blockbuster three-day weekend that ranked among their top grossing since they first opened.
“We felt like we were really making it,” TJ said.
The crowds thinned in the second half of the month, and the Cusumanos told themselves that a drop-off was inevitable. Yet February turned into March, and one or the other of them glanced at the binder they left open by the phone for writing down reservations. There were few names listed even on a Friday or Saturday night. “Just the winter blues,” the Cusumanos reassured each other. They chalked up the slowdown to the cyclical nature of the restaurant business and a population tired of trekking outside at the end of a long winter. On some nights, they seemed more like weather forecasters than restaurateurs. “Low of twenty-five tonight,” one said to the other to explain a dining room barely half-full on the last Saturday night of February. Another night it was “freezing rain turning to ice.”
Reservations remained down even as the temperature outside warmed up in early March. TJ kept up with current events and had read about this new strain of coronavirus spreading around the globe. At that point, though, the virus had barely reached the shores of the US. Even then, only a few cases had been reported on either coast—far from their modest-sized burgh. Neither mentioned the pending pandemic as a possible explanation for the steep drop-off in reservations.
The date stamps on the food the restaurant was getting from their suppliers were another early sign of the calamity about to hit Old Forge and the rest of the world. Cusumano’s was one of a half-dozen Italian eateries on Main Street in Old Forge, an old coal miner’s town. Phyllis Mischello, the owner-chef of Anthony’s down the street, phoned. So, too, did Russell Rinaldi at Cafe Rinaldi next door and other restaurant owners in town. All of them asked the same question: Were his purveyors sending him older product? TJ noticed the difference in the fish. The catch that typically had been caught within forty-eight hours was now several days out of the water.
“I’m starting to make the correlation,” TJ said. He began to see the impact of the coronavirus on their business.
“We stopped spending money in any way we could,” he said. “Ordering less food. Cutting down on our alcohol purchase. Cutting people’s hours.”
On the second Friday of March—Friday the thirteenth—temperatures hit a high of sixty-four. The crowd that night was still sparse. That Saturday Scranton would have held its annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. In normal times, that would mean an overflow crowd and fat bar bills both in the main dining room and downstairs in the Cellar. “This place would have been a total zoo,” Nina said. But Scranton canceled its parade. Bob Mulkerin was behind the bar in the Cellar that night. Mulkerin was a lifelong Old Forger who’d started bartending on Saturday nights in 2017, after serving a single term as town mayor. (“I care about my kids” was his rationale both for running and deciding not to run for reelection.) Normally, Mulkerin pocketed a couple of hundred dollars in tips on a busy Saturday night. He was lucky if he made $50 that night. A small surprise party was up in the air until a few hours before the guests slated to arrive. They went ahead with the celebration, but the only other people there that night were the battered regulars who parked themselves on the same bar stools night after night. In a room that in normal times practically vibrated with good cheer, the mood was more that of a wake.
On Sunday, the mayor of Philadelphia, two hours to the south, suspended indoor dining. The governor put the same restrictions on restaurants in the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia and also in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh. TJ recalled the night as a last hurrah, as if people sought one more night out before the inevitable. “It was kind of a good Sunday, which kind of shocked us,” TJ said. At the end of the shift, he sat with Jessica Barletta, a waitress who had been with him and Nina since they first opened their doors. She was herself a small business operator with her own dance studio in Scranton.
“TJ’s like, ‘I’m pretty sure we’re not going to be open this Wednesday,’” Barletta recalled. (Cusumano’s is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.) “I was like, ‘Yeah.’” Pennsylvania’s governor, Tom Wolf, made it official that Monday. Restaurants could still offer takeout and delivery. But Wolf signed an order shutting down indoor dining everywhere in the state.
TJ’s first hours in lockdown were spent largely on his phone, texting or talking with the restaurant’s two dozen employees. The servers and bartenders tended to have other sources of income but not his kitchen staff, who needed a paycheck to pay the rent and buy food. That would be his first hard decision: Whom could he afford to keep, if anyone, and whom would he lay off?
TJ tried not to think about the timing. A landmark moment for any business is establishing a retirement program for its employees. Finally, he and Nina were making enough to start a 401(k) for themselves and several longtime employees. They were only a couple of weeks from finalizing a small benefits package that matched an employee’s contributions to a retirement fund when the governor issued his shutdown order. The 401(k) would be added to the list of things that needed to be put on hold for who knew how long.
“We ha
d been very blessed,” TJ said. “Coming into our seventh year, we were really hitting our stride.” In the prior fifty-two weeks, he figured that they had experienced two or three slow weeks. Yet suddenly he was looking at an indefinite closure.
“Things had really been going great,” he said.
And like that, they weren’t.
* * *
Fifty minutes south of Cusumano’s on the interstate lies Hazleton, another old coal mining town. Both Hazleton and Old Forge date back two centuries to when northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal and iron ore helped power the Industrial Revolution. Yet the modern-day version of each stands as a polar opposite of the other. What distinguishes Old Forge is how little the town has changed over the years. Old Forge was Italian one hundred years ago just as it is Italian today, even as it has the “Polish Alps,” a hilly neighborhood where those of Polish ancestry first settled, and a token Irish pub. People commute to jobs in Scranton or work in town. There are warehouse jobs at a wholesale beer and soda distributor that ranks as one of Pennsylvania’s biggest and more to be found at the sprawling lumber and kitchen supply warehouse just off the main road into town. Many find work inside one of the Italian eateries that for generations have drawn people to Old Forge.
Hazleton, by contrast, has been in great flux for decades. The Hazleton area—the city of Hazleton, with its thirty thousand people, and the surrounding “patch towns” that popped up each time a new mine was opened—has always been a melting pot. The Italians arrived to work its mines (or sell their goods and services to the coal miners, as Cusumano’s people have been doing in Old Forge for several generations) but so did the Irish, the Welsh, the Poles, the Slovaks, the Germans, and, more recently, the Dominicans.
In 1959, the coal industry closer to Scranton collapsed in a single day, after the Knox Coal Company dug too close to the Susquehanna River. What locally is known as the “Knox disaster” flooded mines for miles, all but putting an end to mining in the area. The fall of coal came more slowly to Hazleton but no less emphatically. By the early 2000s, 70 percent of its downtown’s storefronts were sitting empty. For Hazleton, salvation was its proximity to Interstate 80, though some would come to think of that as the source of its problems. This east-west colossus that connects New York City to San Francisco (and also Cleveland, Chicago, and a long list of large cities along the way) cuts past the city only a few miles to the north. Today a massive Amazon fulfillment center occupies one of several industrial parks that a civic group financed just outside of town. Cargill Meat Solutions operates a giant slaughterhouse in that same park. There are also distribution centers there for AutoZone, American Eagle Outfitters, Hershey, and dozens of other brands.
Jobs were again plentiful in the area, which helped resuscitate the local economy. The occupancy rate of the small shops on Broad Street, Hazleton’s main commercial strip—its Main Street—was up around 75 percent at the time of the pandemic. Yet the same easy access to New York (two hours to the east) and New Jersey that drew Amazon and Cargill also attracted workers, most with roots in the Dominican Republic, to the area. Less than 5 percent of Hazleton’s population were Latino in 2000. By the pandemic, more than half were. The English and the Welsh and the Irish who worked the mines in the mid-nineteenth century had banned from their unions the Italians and Eastern Europeans who arrived after them. They made the newcomers feel uncomfortable entering their banks and some businesses. Yet the lessons of that ugly bit of history apparently were lost on the descendants of those who were on the receiving end of that discrimination. They, in turn, have given a hostile reception to this newest immigrant group sharing their small city.
Birmania Hernandez—Vilma to family, friends, and customers—was part of that first big wave of Dominicans to arrive in Hazleton. Born in the Dominican Republic, Vilma moved to New York City when she was nineteen. She married Leonardo Reyes, a fellow Dominican native. He delivered soft drinks and other beverages for a local distributor while Vilma cut hair—first for a salon, then out of their Bronx apartment. They were a family of five stuffed into a two-bedroom place on September 11, 2001. Within six months of the terrorist attack that brought down the Twin Towers, the family bought a house in Hazleton. There, Vilma would finally fulfill her dream of owning her own salon in the United States. On Broad Street, only a few blocks from the Altamont Hotel, where JFK had famously addressed a large crowd in the waning days of the 1960 election, she opened Vilma’s Hair Salon.
Like TJ, Vilma struggled through her early years in business. Unlike him, she faced the extra burden of prejudice against those perceived as interlopers. Her salon had been open for several years when, in 2006, Hazleton passed what some in the national press cast as maybe the country’s harshest anti-immigration measure. Among other provisions, a business would lose its license if it was caught hiring an undocumented immigrant, and landlords would be fined $1,000 a day if they rented to one. Vilma, who spoke little English, had her citizenship papers but the measure scared off many newcomers to town. What she referred to simply as “la ordinancia” cost her salon, she figured, roughly half its business.
The industrial parks on the edge of town, however, continued to flourish, expanding the customer base for a hairstylist eager to grow her business. Vilma added chairs and cutting stations and hired people to fill them. She had eight people working for her when the pandemic hit. Six cut hair, and the other two did the shampooing and swept up around the shop.
Vilma, who turned fifty-four in 2020, was a fit woman with a kind and open face. She wore her dark hair pulled back and had bright, mirthful eyes behind stylish glasses. She spoke to friends still living in the Bronx, who scared her with stories of hairdressers and others in her old neighborhood sick with the disease. There was also the Spanish-language media to frighten her. Still, she could not imagine COVID showing up in faraway Hazleton and resisted the idea that she might have to close her shop, even after the governor banned indoor dining. When three days later Governor Wolf ordered the closure of “all non-life-sustaining businesses in Pennsylvania,” she still did not seem able to fully process the news. Her daughter, Genesis, phoned to make sure her mother had heard Wolf’s announcement. “She tells me, ‘Mami, the governor says you need to close,’” Vilma said. “And I was like, ‘How could this be? It can’t be true.’” Vilma had lived through September 11 and still cut hair the next day and the day after that. In seventeen years of business, she had never closed the shop once, even for vacation. “I didn’t want to believe it,” she said of the shutdown order.
Vilma, despite her disbelief, was relieved to have an excuse to close her shop. Her people hovered over customers at the shampoo bowl and leaned into people’s faces while cutting their hair. Health experts at that point stressed the possibility of picking up the virus touching a doorknob or another infected surface. Vilma and her staff started wearing gloves during work. They disinfected their workstations after every client. But the salon itself was a communal and intimate space. Like TJ, Vilma felt disaster coming even if she could not have articulated it at the time. Inside her normally busy shop, her staff were standing around, waiting for customers who apparently didn’t feel comfortable stopping by for their usual weekly or biweekly visit to the beauty parlor. The governor only made official what in retrospect had seemed inevitable for at least a week.
“People were scared,” Vilma said. “I was scared.” The coming days did nothing to calm her fears. The industrial parks and Hazleton’s connection to New York City meant the virus was spreading rapidly through her small, working-class city. Soon Hazleton was posting what local officials believed were the highest COVID numbers in all of Pennsylvania. A disproportionate share of the essential workers staffing the Amazon fulfillment center and Cargill meat processing plant were Latino, and many were going back and forth to New York. Some in town blamed the area’s Latinos for the town’s high numbers, just as they would blame them for the curfew the mayor, a Republican, imposed on all residents. On the national stage, Donald
Trump was whipping up hate against Asian Americans by calling COVID-19 the “Chy-na virus” and the “kung flu.” In Hazleton, Vilma and others were braced for a possible fallout against Latinos.
Vilma phoned each of her eight employees to let them know she had to lay them off. She had always been skilled at filling out government forms and offered any help they might need navigating the state’s unemployment system. Two of her people would not qualify for unemployment because they had only recently started to work at her shop. She paid them what she could and felt thankful that she and Leonardo had savings. They would need any reserves to pay the mortgage on the shop and cover other business expenses while they were closed.
Vilma worked at not fretting about her long-term prospects. Yet the hours she burned each week talking to her employees did not help. “They’re calling, worried about their future, worried they won’t have a job,” she said. She did her best to hide her deepest fears but also couldn’t bring herself to reassure them that everything would be okay.
“They’re asking me, ‘When we will be back?’ ‘What is going to happen?’ I had to tell them I didn’t know,” Vilma said.
“No one knows anything.”
* * *
The story of small business has always been one of survival. Technology evolves, tastes change, markets shift, new competitors emerge. Technology rendered blacksmiths and buggy whip makers obsolete, and later video rental stores and twenty-four-hour photo shops. Neighborhoods morph, causing closures, and recessions wipe out businesses that had been limping through good times. The internet created opportunities for entrepreneurs but also represented a new kind of threat. Sometimes pint-sized enterprises are collateral damage when goliaths trample them in pursuit of big piles of money, like when the financial manipulations by Wall Street giants caused the 2008 subprime meltdown. Nearly ten years passed before the small business sector recovered from the resulting deep recession.