After almost 45 years, Raul's Candy Store has placed "going out of business" signs in their front windows and announced they'll be closing their doors for good at the end of the month. Hearing this news yesterday, I hurried over to see for myself what had become of this local institution, having not been inside in easily over five years. When I arrived, standing under the scaffolding which now covers a good section of the block on B, a small group of men were gathered in front talking amongst each other, and a few feet away an older woman greeted a couple in spanish who were selling clothing and other items hung from the chain-link fence. Pushing open the smooth weathered door of Raul's, I almost knocked into the reporter who had clearly been standing inside for some time, his large video camera set up on a tripod in the middle of the room as he tried unsuccessfully to communicate with Raul and another man who sat comfortably in a set of chairs by the front door. I said hello and asked if they would be alright with me taking a few photos quickly, the reporter shooting me a glare as the two men nodded. I squeezed in closer to the counter and took what photos I could. While the store was noticeably more bare than what I remembered, it seemed practically untouched from a time when my head didn't reach much farther than the countertop I was pressed against. As the reporter got someone on the phone who spoke Spanish, I was asked to leave, ushered back out into the street where more people had stopped to pay their respects.
Raul Santiago and Petra Olivieri were both born in Puerto Rico but met in the neighborhood, marrying soon after. A few years later, in 1976, they opened their little "kiosko" in the heart of Loisaida (originally on Ave D, then moving a few blocks over to where it sits now at 205 Avenue B), and have sold (literal) penny candy, tchotchkes, and your normal deli goods nonstop since then. For anyone who wants a glimpse into the Lower East Side of a different era, I would stop by Raul's in their final few weeks. Yet, while it's easy to feel caught up in the nostalgia of it all, the very impossibility with which Raul's has managed to stick around is also what makes it so special to many of us. For a moment, with people gathered out front playing music smoking weed and riding custom bikes, the Lower East Side of our childhood and many childhoods before, seems within reach; one need only to step inside and suddenly you have arrived in a space somehow both time-less, suspended from the onslaught of urban re-development around it, yet simultaneously buckling under the weight of its agedness.
For any callous observer, it comes at no surprise that in 2019 a business selling penny candy in the LES isn't doing well financially; however, one would be missing the alternative urban vision which a place like Raul's in-part attempted to engender. Santiago and Olivieri themselves say that despite the rent prices which have grown ten-fold since they opened their candy store, they simply wish to retire; yet, there is no doubt in my mind that Raul's closing is just another moment in the displacement of Manhattan's Puerto-Rican communities. While Raul's certainly sold penny candy (at 70's prices! scream every news outlet learning of this story), to think it has been sustained all these years by those sales alone and is only now coming to realize the shortcomings in this business model, is as ridiculous as thinking that by raising their prices they would have survived. The plan for the Lower East Side, and New York City more generally, does not include in its vision a space for immigrant business' which are not extractive, which seek to create a space with little assumption that money must be spent, and Raul's was never a part of that imagination.
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| (Some shots of the inside of Raul's, looking towards the front door.) |
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