N.Y. / REGION

Shop Owners in a Changing Brooklyn Decide to Call It Quits

By 
Richard Zawisny is a co-owner of Eagle Provisions, in South Park Slope, Brooklyn.Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times 
To hear some mourners of New York’s late, great nostalgia-filled haunts tell it, the soul of the city is crumbling. With every upward tick in property values, the eternal lament goes, another rapacious landlord muscles out a neighborhood dive bar for a new bank, drugstore or gym.
So what to make of John and Richard Zawisny, the owners of a South Park Slope classic — a Polish sausage and craft-beer emporium called Eagle Provisions that advertises, in blocky hand-painted letters, “Epicurean Delights From Around the World” — that they are selling off and closing for good, and glad about it?
“I envisioned that after 35 years, we’d be like smooth sailing, and it’s not smooth sailing,” said John Zawisny, 62, who bought the business with his father and brother in 1979, when the neighborhood was mostly Italian and Polish.
In those days, the Zawisnys were paying local organized crime figures $500 a week to stave off harassment and threats. Now it is a different New York, where young professionals renovate neighborhood rowhouses and developers come to your door offering millions — in this case, seven and a half of them — to buy your building and turn it into apartments.
The Zawisnys own their building at 637 Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. The Polish regulars who used to come have moved on to Staten Island, New Jersey and farther afield.Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times 
“You didn’t realize that it was worth so much more than what we bought it for,” Mr. Zawisny said on a recent afternoon at his store, where the shelves were coming down and everything was half off. “Then you start to contemplate, ‘Why am I doing this, when I could be with my family,’ and no one knows how much time we have.
“God doesn’t give you a guarantee. You could be dead tomorrow.”
Since the Zawisnys own their building, they could choose to stay, a privilege unavailable to the owners of Café Edison, Penn Books and hundreds of other neighborhood institutions in Brooklyn and Manhattan that rising rents have chivied out of existence. But like some other mom-and-pop proprietors who have shut down or sold in recent years, the Zawisnys are not just tired of the long hours, the skirmishes with the health department and the stress. And they are not just looking to cash in. After decades of anchoring their neighborhoods, these business owners have found that they no longer quite belong.
“It’s part of the hyper-gentrification process,” said Jeremiah Moss, who eulogizes the city’s fallen businesses on the blog Vanishing New York. “It’s harder to see it, because it looks on the surface like they’re just cashing in and they’re making a decision to retire and they’ll have a pile of money and that may be wonderful. But would it be happening if the neighborhood hadn’t changed so dramatically?”
Mr. Moss, who uses a pseudonym and will not divulge his real name, can recall a few other exceptions to the usual tale of landlord versus tenant. There was the original Manganaro’s in Hell’s Kitchen, a venerable Italian grocery whose owners closed down in 2012 after 119 years in business, saying they were simply tired of struggling against a bad economy and a changing neighborhood. There was De Robertis Pasticceria and Caffe, the 110-year-old Italian bakery in the East Village whose owners sold the building last year for a reported $12 million.
In South Slope, the Zawisnys said they were bowing to pressures inside and out. The Polish regulars who came for sauerkraut, sausage and Old World-style dark bread have moved to Staten Island, New Jersey and farther afield. And though the Zawisnys added a selection of about 2,000 craft beers from around the world to attract younger customers, it has been hard to keep up.
The other ethnic groceries on Fifth Avenue closed long ago. And John Zawisny wanted to retire after having a stroke a few years ago.
A developer is building apartments on what used to be a parking lot at the end of the block; now it will do the same with the Eagle property.
More than a century after opening, Teddy’s Bar & Grill in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was sold to new owners this year. Michael Appleton for The New York Times 
In Williamsburg, where new luxury apartment buildings and upscale chain stores have swept an increasingly affluent demographic into the north side of the neighborhood, the owners of Teddy’s Bar & Grill, a 19th-century brewery outpost turned Polish watering hole turned artists’ spot turned neighborhood tavern, have decided to bow out.
Their children showed little interest in inheriting the business, they said, and after nearly 30 years, they needed a break and a few fresh minds to reinvent the restaurant for an area that has become a playground for the affluent. More than a century after opening, Teddy’s Bar & Grill was sold to new owners this year.
To Felice Kirby, who bought the building and the bar with Glenn Kirby, now her husband, and Lee Ornati, another partner, from Mary and Teddy Pruscik in 1987, Williamsburg has strayed uncomfortably far from the working-class neighborhood she came to as a community organizer in 1979.
She spent those early years struggling to persuade outsiders to invest in Bedford Avenue when it was studded with vacant storefronts. Now an Apple store and a Whole Foods are moving in. By finding buyers they knew from the community and negotiating what they felt was a reasonable rent, she and her partners tried to guard against the endings that have befallen many of their favorite mom-and-pops over the years.
A major real estate developer had approached them about buying the building, Ms. Kirby said, but they turned away the developer, whom she declined to name.
“It’s just wrong how banks and real estate developers are pricing ground rent in neighborhoods that take off,” she said. “It’s like punishment for the small businesses that make the neighborhood famous and hot.”
For Teddy’s “to turn into a chain, or be vacant, or become something without a sense of community life, would really be a loss to the greater community,” Ms. Kirby said.
The partners tried to preserve the Teddy’s tradition by stipulating in the sale that the new owners must keep original fixtures like the wood flooring and the stained-glass sign that reads “Peter Doelger’s Extra Beer,” a vestige of the bar’s earliest years, when it was one of the franchises of a Brooklyn brewery. (Ms. Kirby declined to say how much Teddy’s was sold for.)
The partners tried to preserve the Teddy’s tradition by stipulating in the sale that the new owners must keep original fixtures like the stained-glass sign that reads “Peter Doelger’s Extra Beer.” Michael Appleton for The New York Times 
Most of those shuttering their doors, however, seem content to consign their buildings to the highest bidder.
In Sheepshead Bay, a developer bought the El Greco Diner — the kind of place that became locally indispensable for offering hearty portions to all comers, at all hours — for $13 million last year, planning to build condominiums. The building was demolished this spring.
For four decades, it was the Venetoklis family livelihood, the business around which Anastasia Venetoklis’s life, and those of her sons, came to revolve. But the constant strain of running the business had worn them down. Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, flooded the basement and closed the restaurant for weeks. And they had a buyer.
They let it go.
“We wanted to say goodbye to El Greco standing up,” Ms. Venetoklis said. “We didn’t want to give it up and see it fading away for someone who will not take care of it.”
After Eagle Provisions closes in early June, Richard Zawisny is thinking of opening a Polish sausage store on Staten Island, where he and his family have lived since immigrating from Poland in the 1960s. He will have more time to devote to the Polish heritage organizations he loves, his way of staying connected to his father, a businessman in Poland who found work as a sausage-maker in Brooklyn.
John Zawisny is looking forward to resting and spending time with his daughters. He has made peace, he said, with their decision.
“What are you doing?” a regular customer mock-scolded him on a recent afternoon after hearing the unwelcome news.
“We’re going to retire — the American dream,” he said, smiling wide. “Our customers keep getting younger and younger, and I guess we didn’t realize we’re getting older.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 26, 2015, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Seeing Their Brooklyn Gone, and Taking Big Checks to Go . Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe