The nail salon next door is closed for the foreseeable future because of extensive water and smoke damage. My favorite pizza place (next to the salon) may reopen today. The movie theater on the other side of the restaurant -- a very sturdy structure dating back to the 1930s -- expects to reopen today after mitigating the smoke damage.
I love my breakfast place. Not only do they have the best eggs benedict, the owner is a smart and genuinely good business woman. She worked so hard to keep her wait and kitchen staff employed, even when the dining room had to be closed due to covid. Through Facebook, she offered to do your shopping for you. She put together boxes of fresh vegetables and fruit along with paper towels and paper napkins, using her professional suppliers to help her customers stock their pantries even when grocery store shelves were empty. She paid her waitresses to fill the boxes and bring them out to cars. How imaginative! What a good boss!
She made it through the worst of it, and now her business is gone. A GoFundMe was started for the restaurant, and she told the organizer that she would give the first $10,000 to pay her wait and kitchen staff.
I love my movie theater. It's an art deco movie palace that's been on this very spot since the dawn of talkies. I'm so grateful it will be OK.
This is so very sad. I looked up and read about this at the Sun-Times Website. Tragic. I hope the damaged businesses can rebuild and come back. This reminds me of a massive fire we had not far from here just about a year ago. The fire started in some new construction condos, and quickly spread to some nearby "mom and pop" businesses and wiped them out. We lost a locally owned drug store, a nail salon and dry cleaners. It is so tragic when hard working entrepreneurs with good locally owned businesses are affected by a tragedy like this. So sad for those who lived in the apartments above too. I hope they can all rebuild and come back stronger. I am glad your favorite movie theater was not impacted. We have almost no small theaters like that left here in Salt Lake City. There used to be a lot of them. Now we just have a bunch of mega-plexes that you get lost in trying to find the theater where your movie is being shown. I miss the way things used to be, in that regard. I hope you have a good Thanksgiving.
ReplyDeleteWhat a sad story! I wonder how the neighborhood will rally and recover?
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