Althouse: 90+ people out of work, after OWS wrecks business at Milk Street Cafe.

December 14, 2011

90+ people out of work, after OWS wrecks business at Milk Street Cafe.

"It’s terribly sad," said the owner of the once popular, now defunct 23,000 square-foot restaurant.

(Via Insta-#OCCUPYFAIL-pundit.)

61 comments:

ricpic said...: Those people were all being exploited anyway...by the...the system!; 12/14/11, 11:42 AM
David said...: You can't make an omelet without breaking some heads.

wv: hiest (I kid you not).; 12/14/11, 11:44 AM
Andy said...: Seems like the city is to blame for not removing the barricades. They kept them up even after OWS got cleared out of the park? It's not like the protesters wanted the barricades up.; 12/14/11, 11:48 AM
Ned said...: The heavy price of liberalism...paid EVERY time.; 12/14/11, 11:50 AM
Joe said...: (The Uncredentialed, Crypto Jew)
Seems like the city is to blame for not removing the barricades. They kept them up even after OWS got cleared out of the park? It's not like the protesters wanted the barricades up

1) Erected to prevent a REOCCUPATION….
2) The first 70 let go DURING OWS, Hatdood….so OWS did them in, during, not after.; 12/14/11, 11:56 AM
purplepenquin said...: The way our hostess wrote the headline for this post it would appear that the protesters were the ones who were responsible for "wrecking" this business.

Those of us who bothered to click the link know that it was the city that refused to remove the barricades.; 12/14/11, 11:56 AM
Rialby said...: So, let me get this straight - in 2011, the world saw protests from Islamists across North Africa and the Arabian peninsula as well as protests from Communists in the US, Europe and the rest of the developed world. Year of the protestor.

In 2009 and 2010, the US saw major, peaceful protests from the Tea Party. Not years of the protestor.

Got it.; 12/14/11, 12:00 PM
Paddy O said...: "It’s terribly sad," said the owner of the once popular, now defunct 23,000 square-foot restaurant.

Ah, a familiar tale. One wants to encourage the free exchange of personality and ideas and protests and desirables and undesirables. But the sad fact is that by letting those whose only interest is in causing chaos continued to cause the chaos, all the regulars are blocked from taking part. People don't want to fight to just hang out, only to be insulted and undermined at every point.; 12/14/11, 12:00 PM
HJA said...: FYI, this place has gotten mostly very bad reviews, many of which date back to June (was that before OWS? I can't remember.)

http://www.yelp.com/biz/milk-street-cafe-manhattan; 12/14/11, 12:02 PM
Andrea said...: To those who are trying to fob this off on the city and give the OWSers a pass: the barricades wouldn't have been put there if it weren't for the protestors. Yes, the city should have removed the barricades, but the ultimate responsibility is on the shoulders of the OWSers. Stop protecting them.; 12/14/11, 12:03 PM
Andy said...: 2) The first 70 let go DURING OWS, Hatdood….so OWS did them in, during, not after.

That's not what the article says.; 12/14/11, 12:06 PM
traditionalguy said...: So that is how Marxist Revolutions always manage to leave everyone in poverty and dependent on the Party to eat.

They just stop all work being done by Owners and their employees.; 12/14/11, 12:06 PM
Andy said...: To those who are trying to fob this off on the city and give the OWSers a pass: the barricades wouldn't have been put there if it weren't for the protestors.

Says you. The city did not have to put up barricades. They made a choice. They should be held responsible for that choice.; 12/14/11, 12:08 PM
Franklin said...: To be fair - this cafe was at 40 Wall, which is pretty far from Zuccotti Park. There have been a couple failed cafes in that space before.

I'm sure the barricades didn't help, but this cafe very well could have been going out of business anyway.

- Rightwing teabagging nutcase; 12/14/11, 12:09 PM
Joe said...: (The Uncredentialed, Crypto Jew)
Milk Street Cafe’s closure will result in the layoff of 70 workers. That’s on top of the 21 let go in October

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/milk-street-cafe-fidi-eatery-lost-business-due-occupy-wall-street-barricades-close-good-article-1.990960#ixzz1gX9PZIM0

My bad….I thought they let the 70 go and then closed…; 12/14/11, 12:10 PM
Robert Cook said...: I have to wonder how well the restaurant was really doing...it it was wildly popular before, I can't see that its patrons wouldn't return after the occupation was broken up--or even find a way to get there during the occupation.

Perhaps the restaurant owner is simply blaming external events, or the city, for might have been inevitable. The restaurant business is brutally tough in NYC.; 12/14/11, 12:14 PM
edutcher said...: We had to destroy the cafe to save it.

I wonder if this was one of those restaurants where the Occupiers would regularly barge in to harangue the patrons and the help.

Andy R. said...

Seems like the city is to blame for not removing the barricades. They kept them up even after OWS got cleared out of the park? It's not like the protesters wanted the barricades up.

People can walk around barricades, and often do.

It really isn't just a river in Egypt, is it?; 12/14/11, 12:15 PM
rhhardin said...: Les Barricades Mysterieuses

I learned it in high school.; 12/14/11, 12:19 PM
Levi Starks said...: I can't even imagine all the permits required, rules, and regulations that must be followed in order to operate a restaurant in a bureaucracy rich place like NYC.

And yet a bunch of ill mannered self absorbed hoodlums are allowed to squat unsupervised with the specific goal of causing economic damage to responsible people who make a the world a habitable place for them.

We really do deserve another 4 years of Obama.; 12/14/11, 12:26 PM
MadisonMan said...: I've never been at the Milk Street Cafe, so I can't really comment on things -- what did these barricades look like, anyway (I drive across town sometimes for a good restaurant, I'm gonna go around a barricade), but I'll make a couple points.

The on-line reviews were bad.

A successful restauranteur will not want to be known for failed ventures. So saying this failure springs from OWS rather than bad food/service is a good business move.

I suspect that OWS accelerated the downward spiral of this restaurant....but it doesn't sound like it had far to go. And the City doesn't seem to have done much to stop things.; 12/14/11, 12:28 PM
Peter said...: Surely this belongs in the next item on this blog, the correlation/causation one.

That is, the OWS protesters may be fools, NYC may not know how to handle unruly protesters, but, surely, the restaurant might have gone out of business anyway- even if there had been no protests?

After all, restaurants go out of business all the time. And the failure rate for newly opened ones is really high.; 12/14/11, 12:32 PM
Beta Rube said...: I wonder if any of these 90+ newly unemployed folks would take one of those awful post-Walker State jobs, what with diminshed bargaining rights and nominal contributions to current and future benefits.; 12/14/11, 12:33 PM
Monkeyboy said...: beta;

You forgot the occasional flying brick landing on your head.; 12/14/11, 12:40 PM
Anonymous said...: I have read Althouse since the first week of its existence and have commented regularly under various names since then, but I always seem to miss the big blowouts. Could someone post a link to the thread that is referred to as "Bloody Sunday"?; 12/14/11, 12:40 PM
Anonymous said...: I prefer the Mysterious Barricades on harpsichord, or even classical guitar. LIght and playful, I loved its simple structure and progressions, and always found myself imagining a vague abstraction, like some sunken rectangular part of a ship jutting out of shallow water...just off a lonely coast, maybe in a sunbreak after a storm.

Sooner or later, I would imagine numbers as part of shapes or accompanied with colors, which makes me suspect mathematics and music are deeply connected.

As for the restaurant. Sorry to see them go. If it's not Bush's fault, it's clearly Elizabeth Warren's fault you know. She laid the foundations.; 12/14/11, 12:42 PM
Alex said...: Omelets and eggs.; 12/14/11, 12:43 PM
Alex said...: Beta - what jobs?; 12/14/11, 12:44 PM
Alex said...: OWS - destroying good jobs one city at a time!; 12/14/11, 12:44 PM
Matt said...: The owner "Epstein partially blames the police barricades that are in front of his cafe." Those barricades stayed up long after the OWS was cleared. Basically he was dealing with a "police siege" [his words, btw].

So the OWS movement is indirectly to blame, sure. But the police didn't make it easy either by keeping the barricades up for so long.; 12/14/11, 12:44 PM
Chuck66 said...: From the NY Daily news comments, it sounds like the restaurant wasn't one to go out of your way for, but it was pretty good anyway.

So basically they relied on walk-up traffic. People who were in the area anyway.

So yes, the OWS crowd did cause those people to lose their jobs by making it inconvenient to go to this business.; 12/14/11, 12:52 PM
Alex said...: So the OWS movement is indirectly to blame, sure.

Police = PIGS. Fascists, murderers!!!!

Chant it with me - PIGS PIGS PIGS!; 12/14/11, 12:53 PM
Alex said...: So yes, the OWS crowd did cause those people to lose their jobs by making it inconvenient to go to this business.

Loitering and harassment is illegal, no? New York City has turned into a joke.; 12/14/11, 12:53 PM
rhhardin said...: Beans and Barricades; 12/14/11, 1:01 PM
Amartel said...: Collateral damage, for the greater good.; 12/14/11, 1:04 PM
Toad Trend said...: "It's not like the protesters wanted the barricades up."

Brilliant thinking hatboy.

The truth likely lies somewhere between the fact that 1. a very high percentage of restaurants fail and 2. the OWS protest circle-jerkers did this business no favors with their hissy fits.

Ned's statement sums this story pretty well methinks.; 12/14/11, 1:08 PM
Amartel said...: Oh, Penguin, could you be more predictably lame? Of course it's never not someone else's fault.

The Milk Street Cafe opened in NY in June 2011 so it never really got a chance to succeed before being turned into a collateral damage bathroom by OWS. The Boston Milk Street Cafe opened in 1981 and is still in existence which would seem to indicate a successful business model.
http://newyork.milkstreetcafe.com/Default.aspx; 12/14/11, 1:10 PM
Brian Brown said...: purplepenquin said...
The way our hostess wrote the headline for this post it would appear that the protesters were the ones who were responsible for "wrecking" this business.

Um, they are.

But thanks for participating.; 12/14/11, 1:17 PM
Chip Ahoy said...: That barricade-picking-up guy sure takes his his time about it.

Had that around here too. Barricades stood around for over a week following an event before a city truck was sent to pick up the barricades. One low-traffic street stayed closed for a week unnecessarily because it took awhile to realize it was up to us to move them out of the way.; 12/14/11, 1:22 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: Watch this..

This is rare.; 12/14/11, 1:31 PM
caplight45 said...: One day they will all thank #Occupiers for the experience. I'm quite certain.; 12/14/11, 1:31 PM
Abdul Abulbul Amir said...: If the guy was employing 90+ people, he was almost certainly a 1%. Serves him right.; 12/14/11, 1:47 PM
caplight45 said...: You will see more from Ms McCaskill in the near future. She has to separate herself from Obama, Reid, #Occupy etc if she has any hope of keeping her seat.; 12/14/11, 2:06 PM
greg46107 said...: The owner opened the business in June and closed in December. Sounds to me as though he was pretty badly under-capitalized. I wouldn't put this squarely on the heads of the OWS freaks or even the city officials, though there's apparently plenty of blame to go around. When the smoke clears, I think it's just a matter of another small business being woefully unprepared to play hardball with the big kids. It doesn't help that his place got pretty roundly slagged in the reviews, either.; 12/14/11, 2:11 PM
Big Mike said...: If other cafes and restaurants in the Zuccotti Park area close down, then perhaps Milk Street Cafe is a true victim of OWS.

If he's the only one, then the most that can be said is that the protestors and the city's barricades accelerated the process of failure.; 12/14/11, 2:23 PM
Spread Eagle said...: The owner opened the business in June and closed in December. Sounds to me as though he was pretty badly under-capitalized.

I'd wager that very few startup restaurants are sufficiently capitalized to withstand 3 months of police barricades blocking customer access during their first 6 months.; 12/14/11, 2:31 PM
Revenant said...: This seems more like a NYC Government Fail than an Occupy Fail.; 12/14/11, 3:03 PM
new york said...: go to google maps and type in 40 wall street, the address of the restaurant and see how far it is from zucotti park. this has nothing to do with OWS and everything to do with city hall; 12/14/11, 3:25 PM
new york said...: I don't understand why a professor of constitutional law would post garbage from the daily news instead of being the least bit interested in the huge violations of civil liberties in this country. ever think about the first amendment? In addition to excessive force, many police departments are now targeting journalists for arrests and intentionally delaying arraignments of protestors.
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/14/my_37_hours_with_the_nypd/

sorry for the earlier double post; 12/14/11, 3:37 PM
Fen said...: this has nothing to do with OWS

Are you claiming that OWS was never there and never disrupted the business?

And yes, the restaurant business is hard - few actually make it past the first year. That doesn't excuse OWS for making it even harder.; 12/14/11, 3:40 PM
Alex said...: This seems more like a NYC Government Fail than an Occupy Fail.

Agreed. Any community has an obligation to make sure it's a safe place to do business. If these OWS asshats tried their thing in MY town, they'd get asses skinned raw.; 12/14/11, 3:41 PM
Fen said...: new york: I don't understand why a professor of constitutional law would post garbage from the daily news

She also posts garbage from the NYTs.

www.salon.com

*snicker* like they're any better than Daily...

instead of being the least bit interested in the huge violations of civil liberties

"Officer, why are you giving me a speeding ticket when you could be out there stopping rapists"

"Officer, why are you arresting me for rape when you could be out there stopping murderers"

Libtards. They really are this stupid.; 12/14/11, 3:44 PM
Brian Brown said...: new york said...

go to google maps and type in 40 wall street, the address of the restaurant and see how far it is from zucotti park. this has nothing to do with OWS and everything to do with city hall

Actually, it has everything to do with OWS, you silly little propagandist.; 12/14/11, 4:21 PM
Larry J said...: And yet a bunch of ill mannered self absorbed hoodlums are allowed to squat unsupervised with the specific goal of causing economic damage to responsible people who make a the world a habitable place for them.

The OWS crowd is like the Madison protestors. They don't give a damn about anyone but themselves. If they're pissed about something, that's all that matters. Screw everyone else!

The protestors are selfish and immature but Time has named them people of the year. That says a lot about Leftists in general and Time in particular.; 12/14/11, 4:46 PM
rhhardin said...: Erik Satie's update of Les Barricades Mysterieuses.; 12/14/11, 4:54 PM
Paddy O said...: "I don't understand why..."

You! A Law professor!; 12/14/11, 4:57 PM
David said...: I love the compassion from the lefties in this thread.; 12/14/11, 5:24 PM
Unknown said...: Broken glass economics at work. OWS stimulates aggregate demand, so they are actually helping to get us out of the recession. Just tell the newly unemployed workers and the business owner: you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs.; 12/14/11, 5:27 PM
MadisonMan said...: The OWS crowd is like the Madison protestors.

Madison protestors were pretty good for some downtown Restaurants.; 12/14/11, 6:21 PM
Amartel said...: The compassionate left: blame the city for not taking the barricades down right away, blame the cafe owner for his poor management of a "once popular, now defunct" business. It's always somebody else's fault in leftyland.; 12/14/11, 6:24 PM
Jason said...: This seems more like a NYC Government Fail than an Occupy Fail.

"Yeah, I shot him. Twice! But it's not my fault he died, your honor! The ambulance shouldn't have been so slow!"

Shitbird.; 12/14/11, 8:57 PM
el polacko said...: "good" restaurant or not, he previously had customers...during and after the squatter camp, he did not have customers.; 12/14/11, 11:12 PM