Westfair Online Videos Deli owner looks to play ball in Yonkers
Deli owner looks to play ball in Yonkers
When Georges Kuri hung his new business sign over his New Main Street storefront in Yonkers, neighbors noticed. “Kuri’s Ballpark Deli,” it announces. There are baseball-themed sandwiches on the menu – Bush-Leaguer and Bench Warmer and Caught Stealing and Joltin’ Joe and Heavy Hitter among them – but not a ball park in sight in downtown Yonkers.
That only exists now in an architect’s drawings for River Park Center, the mixed-use development off Getty Square planned by Struever Fidelco Cappelli L.L.C. that includes a 6,500-seat minor league stadium directly across Nepperhan Avenue from the deli. The stadium looms in Kuri’s vision for his startup enterprise. Across the busy avenue, shuttered shops along New Main Street stand at the gates to the small-business owner’s field of dreams.
The sign went up about two months before the deli and caterer’s opening in the three-story rental building Kuri owns at 204 New Main St. “People would walk by and knock on the window: ‘Hey, is that ball park really coming? Do you know something we don’t?’” he said last week outside his 1,100-square-foot store.
“This almost in their eyes or their minds legitimized all the talk. People are excited about it in this area.”
All the talk about SFC’s $1.6 billion downtown and waterfront redevelopment and the location of the planned stadium drew Kuri back to his native Yonkers to resume his family’s tradition of enterprise there. After several years in telecommunications sales, most recently at Norcom Solutions in Thornwood, the 32-year-old graduate of Manhattan College decided he “wanted a shot at managing my own business.”
Yonkers seemed the opportune place for that.
The son of Jordanian immigrants, Kuri carried a legacy into his new venture. His late father, Ibrahim, ran a liquor store at the same location in the ‘70s before converting it to a delicatessen. A tenant operated a bodega there, on a block lined with Mexican eateries and clothing boutiques and a Hispanic Pentecostal church, when fire heavily damaged the building in 2007.
For the Kuri family, “We were really out in left field,” said the deli owner. “We didn’t know what we were going to do with the property.” After 18 months of renovations and construction and with a $175,000 business investment and five employees, Kuri opened Ballpark Deli.
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Hani Saigh makes this comment
Thursday, 02 July 2009