by Nina Shield
It wasn’t until Zachary Mack was wading across Avenue C and a police officer yelled at him to turn around that the severity of the situation finally registered. “I got out of the water on 6th Street with rats swimming out of the flood on either side of me, like something out of Titanic,” he says. “The cop told me to leave because power lines run under the street, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying over the storm. I had no idea if the water had actually reached any further. I was in a bizarre state of shock and panic.”
Mack was attempting to get to Alphabet City Beer Co., the bar that he opened last May with David Hitchner, to turn off the circuit breakers as Hurricane Sandy made landfall on October 29th. The only other people on the flooded streets were trying to get home. “I had been standing on my rooftop in the wind and rain trying to get a cell phone signal so I could call David,” says Mack. “He was watching water pour into the shop and bar on the surveillance cameras when the power went out.”
Mack and Hitchner decided to open ABC Beer Co. after working together for five years at Alphabet City Wine Co., on the same stretch of Avenue C. Their idea was simple: Provide a large selection of craft beers and quality meats and cheeses for the lowest prices possible in a homey, comfortable environment. It quickly became my favorite place to frequent in that area, a friendly, spacious bar and store with twelve rotating taps of craft beers, snacks from local vendors[1], and a 60’s garage music/French pop Spotify station on the speakers.
When they finally made it to the store a few hours later, their fears were confirmed: the surge had exceeded the worst case scenario predictions; the basement was completely flooded; the taps, walk-in refrigerator, electrical system, and inventory had been destroyed; and the upstairs bar was a foot under water. Perhaps most painful was the knowledge that they had made the final payment on their equipment less than two days previously.
They immediately went to work, but found that restocking and rebuilding would be delayed because so many of their vendors had been hit just as hard. “It’s one of the strange simultaneous downsides and positives to relying on as many local vendors as possible,” says Mack. “Everyone was affected, which made it harder to get back to normal, but we all also understood. The first contact after the storm with every single one of our vendors was a long, emotional conversation about the storm, what had happened, what we’d lost, and how we were coping.”
In fact, Mack’s low spirits were quickly replaced with a quiet optimism. He grew closer to the vendors and other restaurant owners in the area as they all worked long days and nights to repair and recover. Two days after the storm, still standing in the wreck, Mack wrote an article for Forbes.com. You can sense the adrenaline flowing, a slight manic edge to his writing, as he explains how energized and gratified he was by the neighborhood’s outpouring of support:
A group of three regulars at my store, who lived around the block showed up at my gate, flashlights and trash bags in hand. ‘We saw what happened last night. What do you need us to do? How can we help you?’… Edi Frauneder (owner of Edi & the Wolf next door) served my coworkers and I the only hot meal we’d had since the power went out…. Morale was noticeably high. Every morning, we’ll show up and Edi will have hot chocolate waiting for us. ‘Who wants some coffee from the catastrophe zone?’ he’ll say to passersby with a smile. We’ll all sit around his tables, stacked with candles, tools, and supplies, and formulate our game plan for the day.
Three months have gone by since Mack wrote his article. Time Out New York has nominated ABC Beer Co. as one of their best new beer bars of the year. They have restored and reopened—originally just six days after the storm, serving only the cans they had been able to salvage. Mack watched nervously as his friend and business partner used a rubber spatula to flip the power supply switch back on while standing in knee-deep water. “We were lucky,” he says,“that upstairs only flooded about a foot. We scrubbed it down—it was an incredible stroke of luck that we decided to embrace our bare concrete floors—and replaced the furniture that was damaged.”
He says the neighborhood is “finally back to normal”: the other restaurants on Avenue C, including Edi & the Wolf, are bustling, as is owner Frauneder’s new cocktail bar, The Third Man. Next door neighbor Bobwhite’s credit card machines were offline for three months, but were restored in early February. Others, though, have not fared as well: The Sunburnt Cow is still waiting for repairs to their gas and electricity, and many businesses are getting increasingly frustrated with Verizon’s lingering outages. Mack and Hitchner are hoping to organize a block party in the spring to raise money; although FEMA was responsive in the wake of the storm, the funds have been “slow coming in.”
Mack and Hitchner have been able to refocus on their original plans for the bar and store, and the crowds are growing. In some ways, their situation was improved by the fact that they are a young business and had been working closely for months with the technicians and workers that they needed to call upon again in the wake of the storm. “I’m proud to say we’re well into recovery territory,” says Mack. “We want to remind people that we lost a lot, but we’re still here, and we’re not going anywhere.”
[1] About 70 percent of their beer comes from Union Beer Distributors (which was almost completely wiped out by the storm), and the rest from Manhattan Beer Distributors, Phoenix Beehive, and Oak Beverages. The snacks come from Crystal Foods (cheese), World’s Greatest Cheeses (a.k.a. Food Matters Again, which carries a lot of locally sourced goods), Essex Cheeses (whose employees tour dairies around the country learning about their suppliers) and Dairyland for grocery, olives, and certain meats.
Nina Shield is an editor and translator living in Brooklyn. Her website is ninashield.com.
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