Since 1927, the 9th Street Bakery has been churning out fresh challah and baked goods daily for the East Village faithful. At the beginning of the year, EV Grieve reported that the bakery would be closing due to a massive rent increase—double their current rent—and that by summer, the 9th Street Bakery would be no more. Alas, summer has come, and the bakery is scheduled to close for good on Sunday. [Insert too-close-to-home joke about fro-yo].
EV Grieve heard rumblings that current owners Oleg and Tetyana Kucherenko would have to move out in the weeks after May 15th to make room for—you guessed it—"a juice/smoothie shop." We spoke with Oleg this morning and he confirmed that a juice bar would be taking up residence. While the rent hike is certainly an issue, for Oleg it's not the issue. "[It's got] nothing to do about rent, it's about business. It can't be generalized because the neighborhood in this spot really changed. Changed so much," he explained. "I have maybe 5% of my customers left. I was fighting until the end, but it was already bad a year ago." Oleg notes that around the same time The Bean opened up across the street and his plan was just to "sell more coffee."
Oleg sees it as a shift in the neighborhood dynamic, though how directly or indirectly that correlates to rent, in his eyes, is unclear. Perhaps they are two sides of the same coin. "It's an end of an era. Forty, fifty years ago each block was having the bakeries and butchers and now all of them gone, all of them closed. So now each block having the restaruant, the juice bar, whatever...that is the era now. Nothing we can change."
As of now, there are no plans to re-open. "We are not looking for [a new location] because when I was working for the bakery 10, 12 years ago, we tried to open 3 locations. It was a year or two for each one and they closed. So I don't have an illusion to open a new one if an 87-years-old one [didn't work]." He is working on the website and hopes to still do deliveries to his old customers.
Though Oleg and his wife have a strong attachment to the bakery— they bought the place in 2003—he noted that the real loss is for [grandson of original owner] Mort Zachter, who "is losing more than me—his grandmother, mother, uncles all worked there."
