Sunday, April 02, 2006
Downtown Pulaski runs on hope
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- Independent voice is silenced in merger
- TOP takes a hard knock
- Lagging on college access
- Alzheimer's drains minds and finances
From the RoundTable blog
Neil Posillico was born in New York and moved to Pulaski about 13 years ago when he was 16. Pam Whitesell has "never lived anyplace else" -- well, except for those six months last year when she and her husband moved her coffee shop to Carroll County and themselves over the county line to Poplar Camp.
Both Posillico and Whitesell have opened small restaurants in the town of Pulaski's historic downtown, a tiny urban core hit as hard as any city's by closed businesses. The town's latest of several efforts at rebirth might be budding, but it looks far from full flower. Entrepreneurs are renovating some of the buildings along Main Street, but many more are vacant, in various stages of ill repair.
Despite the dual challenges of trying to build businesses and reclaiming space tailored to a different era, Posillico and Whitesell have an easy explanation for their commitment to downtown. And, despite their different backgrounds, the explanation is the same.
Pulaski is home. Home means family. And, as Posillico put it, "Main Street seems like it needs some help."
To hear their stories of sweat and sacrifice is to hope that, this time, the downtown rebirth will not be stillborn.
Posillico opened Gino's pizzeria on Main Street in October. It's named for his son, Giovanni, who's 4 and who will be a third-generation pizza man if he follows his father into the business. Neil's father, Giuseppe, made pizza for 30 years before he retired and years ago "was rated the number one pizza man in Long Island by Rolling Stone."
"He didn't want me in the business," Neil Posillico said. "He knows the hours you're gonna put in, the lack of family time."
Neil is working 14-hour days, six days a week. "I'm gonna be closed on Mondays, and that's it."
His wife, Amy, comes in to work Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights "when we can get a baby sitter" for Gino and their two daughters, 10 months and 8 years old.
Pizza sauce may run in the kids' veins, too, but they're too little now to be hanging around the family business, Posillico said. "When they get older, I can be their first job."
I caught him last week by phone on the one Tuesday when Gino's was closed. But Posillico was at work, along with his father and father-in-law, expanding the business.
The pizzeria opened in the fall for carry-out and delivery only. His goal was to expand in two years to a full menu and eat-in dining.
"It's happening a little sooner," he said. He's been listening to customers, and they've been asking for more. "So now we're expanding to sandwiches, then pastas and salads by Friday. I've ordered everything.
"Dine-in is gonna be a couple more weeks."
A preservation group called Friends of the Pulaski Theatre is working on salvaging the town's last movie house and reopening it as a performance and community center. "That should be good for business," I speculated.
"I'd like to see the theater finished," he agreed. "That'll draw a lot more people to this town." But he said parking is a bigger issue.
He'd like to see the town demolish "one of these old buildings that are ready to fall over" and put in surface parking or a garage.
"During the daytime there's absolutely no parking" available on the street. "It's the only downfall of this location."
Whitesell's Hope City Cafe is not on Main Street but in the nearby Maple Shade Business Park, an abandoned shopping center that the town is redeveloping. It has a huge parking lot, but it's in poor shape -- shabby enough to discourage visitors. A friend and I drove to Pulaski a few weeks ago intending to eat at the cafe and drove by the business park twice before pulling in. We thought no businesses could possibly be open in there.
We found the place and enjoyed chicken and tuna salad sandwiches. The town is supposed to resurface part of the parking lot by April 1, Whitesell explained. That would have been Saturday. But last week, she told me by phone the repaving had been delayed till August.
She started her business in 2002 at a different location in Pulaski, moved it to Carroll County in February 2005 and then moved back and reopened in the Maple Shade park that August. She and her husband, Brett, are photographers, and some of their work is displayed and sold in the cafe.
They are empty-nesters, but the cafe is sopping up her time, keeping her away from the nature and sports shoots that she loves. She hopes eventually to have enough business to hire a part-time employee so she'll be able to get out and travel. "That's what I miss right now, not being able to go shoot a soccer game."
She's never wanted to put down roots anywhere else, though. "My parents are both deceased. That's part of it, clinging to my parents.
"And part of it is I really want things to get better for Pulaski." And she thinks they will. There's just a lot of work to do.
"We're running on hope here -- all of us, not just the cafe."
