Coastal New York towns struggle to recover in time for tourists

The sea gulls still wheel indolently over Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, on the lookout for food to scavenge from restaurants, shops and fishing boats. The scene is timeless, but this spring the streets below have less to offer.

Six months after Hurricane Sandy swamped the New York City coastline, Emmons Avenue, the tourist stretch on the northern side of the cigar-shaped bay, has still not returned to its normal bustle, with many restaurants and businesses still shuttered. That dispirited atmosphere is mirrored along the commercial strips of Coney Island, Red Hook, the Rockaways and the city’s other waterfront communities.

In neighborhood after neighborhood, it is harder to find a quart of milk or a slice of pizza, and harder to complete essential services like filling a prescription or cashing a check. Many stores are rushing to reopen before the busy summer season, but others — lacking the money to pay for repairs or entangled in the bureaucracy of recovery programs — have decided to remain closed for good, departures that have sapped neighborhoods of economic life and humming vitality.

“Mambo Sushi, gone! Tzar, gone! Fusion, gone!” said Theresa Scavo, the district manager of Community Board 15, as she reeled off the names of destroyed restaurants on a single block of Emmons Avenue, where only a Greek restaurant, Yiasou, managed to reopen.

A block farther along the bay, a few restaurants and cafes where water reached the ceilings were also shuttered. In total, 14 businesses on Emmons Avenue are still closed, Ms. Scavo said, with a dozen more closed elsewhere in the neighborhood. With warm weather approaching, there is concern that tourists will not flock to the bay as they usually do.

“Everybody suffers, because if people are not coming to eat at your restaurant, they won’t shop at my clothing store,” Ms. Scavo said.

In Coney Island, Brooklyn, the original Nathan’s Famous has still not reopened, though workers have been lugging in sheets of plywood to get the restaurant ready for the peak season that starts Memorial Day weekend. Businesses like Tom’s Coney Island restaurant were largely spared the worst of the flooding because of their location on the elevated Boardwalk. But with attractions like the New York Aquarium and the Coney Island U.S.A. sideshow and museum still closed, their crowds have thinned, said Jimmy Kokotas, owner of Tom’s, noting that he was six months behind in rent.

Along a six-block stretch of Mermaid Avenue, a commercial street in Coney Island that caters to much of the year-round poor and working-class population, many stores are still locked — among them, a Chase bank, a McDonald’s, a bagel store, a Chinese restaurant, a check-cashing place and a Mexican deli. Edward Cosmé, head of the avenue’s trade association, said his 13-year-old beauty parlor, Hair For U, is open only because he spent $40,000 of his own money to replace hair dryers and salon chairs destroyed in the storm, and he received a $25,000 loan at 1 percent interest and $10,000 in cash from the city’s Department of Small Business Services. But the number of customers is down by more than a third, he said, because some residents displaced by the storm have not returned.

“It’s an eyesore to see so many gates still shuttered in a beautiful place like Coney Island,” he said. “It’s bleak to see that six months after the storm that many business are not up and running, and money has not trickled down to a corridor like Mermaid Avenue.”

Chase has managed to set up a sleek trailer, complete with three A.T.M.’s, to service clients until a permanent branch can be built. Balaji Pharmacy, which reopened days after the storm to dispense crucial drugs, has still not finished installing the shelves that will allow it to carry cosmetics and toiletries. “We’re open on a minimal basis,” said Wai Ho, the pharmacist.

In Arverne and other Rockaways neighborhoods in Queens, many grocery stores are still closed and residents have resorted to shopping at bodegas, where the prices tend to be higher. Among the stricken businesses in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the main supermarket for the sprawling public Red Hook Houses, Fine Fare, is still closed, forcing residents to make do with a smaller market or walk a half-mile to a Fairway, which reopened in March.

Many business owners said they had struggled to reopen because their losses were not covered by flood insurance and getting timely government assistance to make repairs was difficult.

Marine Spares International and Tamco Mechanical, two allied businesses in Red Hook that repair ship boilers and pumps, had to replace much of their heavy precision machinery and are only now at 60 percent of usual production, said Jim Tampakis, an owner. He tried to fill out applications for government help but abandoned the effort.

“I became discouraged,” he said. “There was a feeling that businesses were getting the runaround.”

Meredith Weber, a spokeswoman for the small-business services agency, said in an e-mail that “to date citywide, more than 600 loans have been approved totaling nearly $14 million, and more than $3.4 million in matching grants.” In Sheepshead Bay’s ZIP code, the city approved 45 loans totaling $1 million, and 13 grants totaling $65,000; in Coney Island, the department approved 19 loans for $420,700 and 8 grants totaling $40,000. Additional aid to businesses was approved by Congress as part of a storm relief package but has not yet been distributed, city officials said.

Councilman Domenic M. Recchia Jr., who represents Coney Island, has urged the city to ease qualifications for grants. “It’s imperative that more businesses have access to this type of funding so that they can get back on their feet,” he said in written comments to the city’s storm recovery plans.

Some flooded businesses, like the popular Randazzo’s Clam Bar in Sheepshead Bay, used family savings, relatives willing to pitch in, and dedicated staff members with jobs on the line to rebuild quickly. The storm surge sent three or four feet of water inside Yiasou, the nearby Greek restaurant, turning over tables and chairs and ruining the oven and refrigerator. Michael Katsichtis, the son of Yiasou’s owner, said it, too, had no flood insurance, but it got a $25,000 loan and a $10,000 grant from the city and reopened three weeks after the hurricane, even calling an artist to repaint colorful Greek murals.

“If the restaurants are down, not many people are going to want to come to Sheepshead Bay,” he said.