End Comes to a Tribeca Building's Last Two Longtime Businesses

Sayed Abdalla with his son Motaz, owner of the now-shuttered Tribeca Park Cafe. Sayed opened the business nearly 40 years ago and Motaz has been in charge of the day-to-day operations. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib 

As August drew to a close, so too did the two last businesses in the peculiar, trapezoid-shaped building on the Tribeca corner of West Broadway, 6th Avenue, and Walker Street.

With Tribeca Park Cafe, 1 Walker St. and the bar Anotheroom, 249 West Broadway, now gone, the structure is in the hands of a developer and awaiting demolition. A 10-story condo building will rise in its place.

“Tuesday Last Day,” read a sign written in chalk above the bar of Anotheroom, a popular neighborhood watering hole for the past 26 years. Printed by bartender Frank Beltre, he let customers know how he felt about it. “What are they building?” he wrote. “Affordable condos for unemployed bartenders.”

That final evening on Aug. 26, Beltre remained effervescent as he flitted from one end of the bar counter to the other, pouring drinks, clearing tabs, chatting with his customers, and switching up the music. He said that when he first heard about the building’s sale, he held out hope that the bar would survive. “I said, maybe the building is a landmark. It looks like a boat or whatever. But I also knew that it was just a matter of time before the corporate machine came and tore us down.” 

For Egyptian immigrant Sayed Abdalla, 72, the closing of Tribeca Park Cafe means the end of a business he started 40 years ago, and has been running with his son Motaz, 30.

“It was a big part of my life. I spent more time there than with my family,” said Sayed. “It was very tough to leave.”

The deli will be especially missed, too, by customers who headed for work at daybreak. “The guys were here prepping at 5 a.m.,” Motaz Abdalla said. “Not a lot of other places opened up at 6. So the construction guys, nannies, dog walkers came in.”

“It’s a damn shame that Sayed’s deli (almost the last of its kind in Tribeca) has to close when it is still serving lots of morning workers. I went there at 6 a.m. for my morning coffee quite often,” Max Blagg, the poet, writer, and performer who has lived nearby for decades, said in an email. “We do not need another skinny glass hi-rise for uber rich oligarchs to buy as investments and never occupy,” he added.

Julie Matsumoto has been living next to Tribeca Park since 1999.  While raising twins, she recalled in an email, the deli and the pharmacy were important resources. “Losing both leaves a huge void,” she said. “I dread the fancy new building.”

That building will be a 10-story, 125-feet-tall luxury condo complex, The Real Deal reported. Developer Sumaida + Khurana bought the 4,650 square foot site from the estate of Peter Matera for $18 million and was looking to acquire additional air rights, according to The Real Deal. 

The three-story structure is one of a portfolio of nearly a dozen Tribeca buildings amassed between the 1970s and 1990s by John Matera, according to Tribeca Citizen, which detailed seven of those holdings in a posting last September. He died in 2009 at age 81. His son Peter, who took over the properties, died at 61 in September 2023, with no direct heirs. Cousins in Staten Island who inherited the estate have since been selling off the buildings.

The six tenants in the Tribeca Park Cafe building had no leases and Motaz said that during the COVID period, Peter Matera did not ask for rent. But after his death, demands for back rent by lawyers for the developers led to the exodus of tenants, including the pharmacy next door to the deli.

“I didn't know who they were and I didn’t want to deal with anybody new,” said Dr. Lisa Kirsch, who had her chiropractic office in the building for nearly 15 years. She left in March 2024 to start working from home.

“Peter was extremely nice and we all just loved him so much,” Kirsch said in a phone interview. “In the beginning, he’d give you a lease and then if he liked you, you could stay and then there’d be no lease.” 

Motaz said that the cafe’s business never fully recovered after the pandemic, and they began shutting down at 3 p.m. instead of 6 p.m. Now that it is closed, he and Sayed are looking to a future without it. He said he is optimistic that his workers will find jobs. “They’re skilled and fast. Anyone would love to have them.” But high rents for commercial spaces in Tribeca as well as in New Jersey where the Abdallas live, have dashed their hopes of reopening elsewhere. Motaz said he will look for work outside of the food business. His dad, he said, is sad and would have liked to work a couple of more years.

Sayed, however, sounded as philosophical as he was forlorn. “When I busted out the sign that we were going to close, people kept expressing their gratitude, and they felt sad that we were leaving,” he said. “But this is the nature of life. Nothing stays forever.”

Can the Mural Be Saved?

Though Tribeca Park Cafe is closed, the vibrant, panoramic mural of Tribeca mounted across the back wall remains. It was painted on plywood in 1992 by Ukrainian-born American artist Konstantin Bokov. Motaz Abdalla said the piece needs a home before the building is demolished. If you are interested, contact Abdalla at abdalmot@gmail.com.