Money Changes Everything

Crest Hardware and Urban Garden Center, a family-owned store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, closed its doors last week after being in business for 62 years. Manny Franquinha and his brother Joe opened in 1962. Manny’s son Joe took the helm and has been running it with Liza, his wife, and his staff, some of whom have worked there for decades. Crest wasn’t just any hardware store, it was central to Williamsburg, a places for plumbers and artists and pilgrimages to see Franklin the Pig and Finlay the Parrot, somewhere to buy a plant to make the apartment feel like something while the keys got copied. They hosted weddings in the garden center, that’s where Vince and I got married, better than any church. Crest has supplied neighboring bar and other essential community pillar Union Pool with reusable bags every week for over the past four years. The bags are used for Union Pool’s weekly food pantry that serves well over 120 people. The property owners decided to sell the building, it will probably become condos. Joe is one of the owners, he was outvoted by his family, who collectively own the building. It is time to get market price. The market doesn’t allow for the amazing things Crest did, only the highest bidder. Liza and Joe did a lot of things that didn’t make money, by putting the community first. Everything cannot be monetized. Everything cannot be transactional.

Joe and Manny and Crest

But it often is. I can’t write enough about Crest to do the business and Liza and Joe justice. I just can’t. But I can be melancholy and lament this world, and it’s my birthday. Sure, part of the sadness is this time of year, the August to September transition we Virgos feel the shorter days in our bones. Our birthdays signify the end of summer, the beginning of school. Heavy sigh.

We throw around the phrase ‘late-stage capitalism,’ without really taking into consideration just how deeply we are entrenched. I bitch a lot about restaurants, but that’s what my grandparents opened when they moved to Towson, Maryland from Greece. A lot of Greeks opened bars and restaurant in and around Baltimore City and County. Many immigrants open food businesses, to reap the benefits of their hard work, to have some say over their lives, to spend time with family.

I miss places that were made by someone, an actual person, not a consultant or specialist. I miss curious and weird design decisions. I love a wall full of handwritten signs by the register, carbon-dated by the yellowing of the scotch tape used to put it up, usually written in cursive. I miss the register. I can write a book, a long one, about what I don’t like, but I’ll just leave this here: I don’t love the term ‘dive bar’ and more than my dislike of those words I flat out hate a bar that has been made to mimic one by a bunch of consultants and richies. I cannot stand a working class cosplay. Just stop. You disgust me.

Most of the advancements in this world have come about to make it easier to spend our money faster, 24-7. We are cynical, savvy consumers. For some people, it doesn’t matter that Joe and Liza lost Crest because they get money from the sale. The world they created is gone, they, and the people who worked for them, many longtime employees, have to now live in this world, where we are cynical and savvy. That’s what this economic system has done to us. We are damaged, spiritually damaged, and this ruin permeates our lives and this world. Maybe that sounds a little dramatic, but it’s not. We’re as disposable as all the small businesses being pushed out because of market value. And I think we have to pretend so often that it doesn’t matter, it makes sense to take the money, because we honestly don’t know if there will be another chance. For most of us, there isn’t. We don’t have that kind of control over our financial lives. I think we protect ourselves by pretending like the things that hurt us are not that big of a deal, but that’s a lie. Feel the terribleness. Feel the pain. It’s there anyway, it deserves our respect.

Liza, Joe and Franklin the Pig

Since the closing announcement, Crest tirelessly has hosted so many events and sales to celebrate and ultimately dismantle 62 years, so many lives, so many keys, so many projects and visits to Franklin the Pig and Finlay the Parrot. It was beautiful and exhausting, a marathon of emotional endurance sure for everyone involved. I learned from this, to lean into the feelings, all of them, that to celebrate and grieve, two things that seem on either end of the spectrum but it’s possible they are twins, that every old small business closing it should be like this. To soak it in for as long as possible, something we understand for the summer, for tomato season. Like when someone dies, I listen to the music, the movies, listen to old voicemails, look at photos. We all do it. We stand around for as long as possible, like we can fill ourselves up. It’s our mistake to make, being human, like we can solve this puzzle.