Mike's Place

By Barry Owens


It is another Wednesday afternoon At Srijee Newsstand, a tiny six-foot-bysix- foot sliver of a stand at 381 Broadway, near the corner of White Street. The lottery machine is spitting out tickets, a small fan stirs the air and the coffee on the range grows blacker by the hour. The day is no different than any other of the week for business on the corner, and the stand is like any other you will find in the city-newspapers, chips and candy in front of the counter; cigarettes, soda and lottery tickets behind the counter.

		But over the years the stand's owner, Mukesh Patel, 53, has earned special notice in the neighborhood. In this corner of Tribeca, Patel has made not only a living, but also a name for himself. He is known as neighborhood enforcer, quick to look after the block with a phone call to 311 or 911 at the first sign of a pothole or illegal activity on Broadway. He is known as the source on the block for news and gossip. He is known as a sympathetic ear for regulars looking to vent their work related frustrations or in need of a quick laugh to ease the tension. Some even know him as the "Mayor of Tribeca." "He is the guy that forms any kind of human connection on this block, basically" said Daniel Negrin, who owns a textile shop a few doors down from the newsstand. But most regulars just call him "Mike."
"Hey, Mikey!" a man calls out as he rushes past. No time to stop, he says, but he'll be back. "Sell me the winner, would ya, Mike?" says a lottery customer. "Hi, Mike, you know what I want," says a young woman who puts down a dollar and change in exchange for a cool bottle of seltzer. "There are maybe 100 people that come here a day," Patel says between customers, "and there are maybe 10 of them that I don't know." Among the long-time regulars is Jack Deacy, who lives just up the block at 395 Broadway. "I grew up in Brooklyn, and Mike is really a throw back to the neighborhood news guy that would know everything about what was happening on the block," he said. Elise Ward, a long-time loft tenant from across the street, often has her packages delivered to the newsstand. "I have always said that he should be mayor," she said. Don Alman, Patel's "best customer," works next door at K&M Camera. He makes so many stops a day at the stand that Patel lets him run a tab. "There aren't many guys like that in the city, let me tell ya," Alman says. Patel, who wears a beard and near perpetual smile, is the chatty sort and speaks a number of languages, including Hindi, his native Swahili, enough Spanish to shoot the breeze with the building superintendent and enough Chinese to wish "good luck" to the ladies from Chinatown who stop by nearly every day for lottery tickets. He has picked up a little Hebrew, Russian and French along the way, as well. "He's completely international," says regular customer Lizzette Perocier, who works at a nearby law firm. "He has a different T-shirt on from a different country every day." On this day he was wearing a "Coca-Cola" T-shirt a customer brought him back from Israel. On another day, you're likely to catch him in the "Guinness" T-shirt that Deacy picked up for him in Ireland. "You have to go with their flow," Patel says of the relationships he cultivates with his customers, "Once you learn what their flow is, you go with it, and you have no enemies." Patel was born in Tanzania, but later moved to Uganda, where he spent many afternoons of his childhood behind the counter of his grandfather's hardware store. He later studied commerce in college, in India, before dropping out of school and immigrating to the United States in 1977. He worked for a few years at a newsstand in Midtown before opening his stand in Tribeca in 1983. On this day he was wearing a "Coca-Cola" T-shirt a customer brought him back from Israel. On another day, you're likely to catch him in the "Guinness" T-shirt that Deacy picked up for him in Ireland. "You have to go with their flow," Patel says of the relationships he cultivates with his customers, "Once you learn what their flow is, you go with it, and you have no enemies." Patel was born in Tanzania, but later moved to Uganda, where he spent many afternoons of his childhood behind the counter of his grandfather's hardware store. He later studied commerce in college, in India, before dropping out of school and immigrating to the United States in 1977. He worked for a few years at a newsstand in Midtown before opening his stand in Tribeca in 1983. He has been there almost every weekday since (he took off one day for the birth of each of his two children). He put both of his kids through college working at the stand. No easy task, as every operator will tell you. The days in the stand can be long and the profit margin slim. "You can live your life, but it's not like you're sleeping easy," says Patel, who rises before dawn each morning and rides the subway in from Queens to open by 7 a.m. His profit is about 20 percent on the merchandise he stocks and pennies on the lottery dollar. By the time he pays the "light bill" and the rent (which in 1983 was $350 per month but has since gone up many times over) he says there is not much left at the end of the month. "If I run the air conditioning," he says, pointing to the small unit installed beneath the awning, "I lose money." One recent afternoon, as the temperature hovered in the 90s and the lottery jackpot climbed past a $100 million, the line at the stand grew long. One customer fanned herself with a handful of tickets. Another borrowed a pencil and used the lid of the ice cream freezer to fill in his numbers. "Soon, you will buy an ice cream factory, my friend," shouts Patel, who is busy in the booth punching in the numbers-first into the lottery machine to his left, and then into the calculator to his right. "Six cents," he says. "It doesn't matter that I just sold a $10 ticket. My cut is six cents." Nancy Yang, owner of a Chinese massage business around the corner on White Street stops in for Popsicles. She thanks Patel for steering a few new customers her way. "If Mike talks, everybody knows," she says. The postman drops by for a bottle of water. Patel hands him the water and refuses to take his money. "Sometimes when I walk by in the morning he offers me a cup of coffee. I never take it," the postal worker later said. "But he is a nice guy." The face of yet another familiar customer appears in the sliding window of Patel's bulletproof glass partition. "Long time, no see," says Patel. "How you been?" "Good," the man says, tossing a bag of mixed nuts onto the counter. "Everybody love you?" Patel asks. "Yeah," the man says. "That's all the matters," says Patel. "That's it."