This Lady is Hitting Every Shop in NYC!

14,000 down, 3,000 to go!! Plus: CAFÉ ANNE Quarterly Report!!!

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Issue #124 of CAFÉ ANNE!

So after I wrote last week about my friend Christine’s experience with her car breaking down in the Holland Tunnel, several readers wrote to share their own tales. My favorite was an account from Robin in Fort Greene. She was returning from a July 4 getaway last summer when her NJ Transit bus stalled out in the Lincoln Tunnel. Ooooh noooos!

To her surprise, within ten minutes an empty MTA accordion bus pulled up alongside, blocking the second lane of traffic. Everyone transferred to the rescue vehicle and made it to the Port Authority just 15 minutes after the scheduled arrival time. “Surprisingly painless and efficient!” reports Robin.

So, Hudson River tunnel breakdowns: not so bad after all maybe?

I also heard from many readers who were charmed to read about Braulio Cuenca, the photographer who camps outside the city’s Marriage Bureau and earns a living shooting photos of newlyweds for $15 a pop. And then there was this comment from my “friend” Aharon: “Tomorrow morning I am going down to City Hall and offering my photographic services for $14.99.”

Finally, everyone’s-left-town-for-the-summer shoutouts to our newest paid subscribers Maria S., Heidi A., and Mary A. along with Nina H., who left me a sweet tip on Venmo. That’s enough $$$ for 58 rides on the empty F train. Every seat is for me!!!

I’m very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve got a feature on Caroline Weaver, the East Village lady who opened the city’s first (and last?) shop dedicated entirely to pencils before embarking on a 17,000-store shopping spree of her own. Please enjoy.

Regards!

Anne

FEATURE

This Lady is Hitting Every Shop in NYC!

Caroline Weaver visited 14,000 mom-and-pop shops in NYC before launching her own in Greenwich Village.

When Caroline Weaver decided to visit every independent store in NYC, she had no idea how many there are—no one tracks this stat! The actual number, she’s since determined, is roughly 17,000 shops. She’s so far visited 14,000 stores ranging from a live coral shop in Staten Island to a wig store in the Bronx. Just 3,000 to go!

Ms. Weaver had a good reason for this embarking on this epic retail odyssey: she needed the data to create The Locavore Guide, the city’s first complete online directory of mom-and-pop shops.

But still, it's kind of crazy, right?

"It's just the way I am," said Ms. Weaver. "When I have an idea in my head, I can't not do it, no matter how crazy it is. I have no barometer for what is too crazy."

True! This effort is hardly Ms. Weaver's first foray into the World of Interesting Projects. She manufactures her own line of bug spray and lip balm, and is perhaps best known as the founder and proprietor of CW Pencil Enterprise, a Lower East Side shop that survived nearly a decade selling nothing but pencils.

The pencil store!

Her latest venture—the Locavore Variety Store in Greenwich Village, focuses on merchandise made within roughly 100 miles of NYC, including her bug spray, of course.

When we met at her shop last week, Ms. Weaver, who has a 12-inch pencil tattooed on her forearm, was happy to show me around. But I was way more interested in her quest to visit every small shop in the city. How does one person shop 17,000 stores?

Ms. Weaver, who is 33 and lives in the East Village, decided to create the directory back when she still owned the pencil shop. A big fan of shopping local, she saw there was no easy way to find the closest independent shop in the city carrying, say, typewriters, or table games.

"I was annoyed," she said. "I wanted this resource for myself."

The project started in May 2022. Ms. Weaver started in her own neighborhood before walking the rest of Manhattan from Battery Park up to Inwood, followed by 170 neighborhoods in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. She's so far walked 1,920 miles, or 40,000 blocks.

It took months to perfect a routine, she said, but now she’s got it down. On a typical walking day, Ms. Weaver gets up at 7 am and eats a huge breakfast because she'll be walking 10-16 miles. "A lot of these neighborhoods I've never been to before. I don't know what I'm going to find, and I have to stay fueled all day," she said.

She next maps the day's route based on advance research. To cover Manhattan, for instance, she first walked the long avenues, which are mainly commercial, before slowly biking the side streets, which are mainly residential and dotted with the occasional shop.

Depending on the weather, Ms. Weaver favors a Barbour jacket because they have many pockets for carrying essentials: a phone, battery pack, notebook, sun screen, face wipes, hand sanitizer and tissues (she visits a lot of park bathrooms which may lack soap and TP).

Plus plenty of cash. "There are a lot of businesses that still operate cash-only," she said. "Especially in the outer boroughs."

On cold days, she wears a Mets beret.

"A beret? Like a French beret?" I said. "That's very silly!"

"It has this orange Mets emblem, and I get so many compliments from random people in random neighborhoods," she said. “It’s a little bit of a strategy because I'm indicating I'm a New Yorker. Especially with the guys hanging outside the bodega, or the guy at the diner—it's an access point."

Ms. Weaver visits a Bensonhurst grocery store in her Mets beret (photo credit: Ian Baker)

Arriving at her target neighborhood around 11 am, she stops at each store she spots on her route and completes a short form on her phone that automatically uploads the details—name, address, inventory, interesting features—to a spreadsheet in the cloud. She'll often chat with the shopkeeper.

Lunch is typically at a diner (every neighborhood still has good one, she said), where she orders a cheddar jalapeño omelet and black coffee. "There's nothing that I love more, as a New Yorker, than sitting alone at the counter at a diner," she said.

She also drinks a lot of espresso and snacks on her favorite bodega treats—Bazzini nuts and Rolets Original Big Beef Chevy meat sticks.

She can cover about 200 stores in a typical day, which ends when the sun sets. Before she got busy opening her new store, Ms. Weaver maintained this routine 3-4 days a week, supporting herself as a freelance small biz consultant on days she wasn't walking.

"Some of the days were really hard," said Ms. Weaver. "A lot of times it was the weather. There were a lot of days where I just felt really overwhelmed by how daunting the task is. And wondering, like, 'Why am I even doing this?' I still have days like that. But for the most part, it's really, really fun."

Ms. Weaver developed her obsession with small shops while growing up in Marietta Ohio, a small town near the West Virginia border with a great Main Street. She loved the candy store, the shoe store and the book shop. But she left ASAP.

"I knew when I visited New York City for the first time, when I was 13, that I would live here," said Ms. Weaver. "There was no question about it. I didn't want to live anyplace else. And doing this project has just reaffirmed all the reasons why I live here."

As her walking journey progressed, Ms. Weaver delighted in neighborhoods she'd never seen before such as fancy-pants Riverdale in the Bronx ("I just felt like I was on another planet!"), Glendale in Queens, with its small village vibe, and South Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Midwood.

"I was blown away by the diversity there," she said. "There are these Hasidic Jewish neighborhoods. But then you also have a Guatemalan pocket, and all your Eastern European pockets, and the little Italian pockets. From top-to-bottom, just everything about it was surprising to me."

And then came Staten Island. To cover the borough, a 30-minute ferry ride from Lower Manhattan, Ms. Weaver rented a car and a tiny cottage and inventoried the entire island in just over a week.

"It was pretty easy, because most of it's strip malls," she said. "I didn't wreck the car. I got a parking ticket on the last day, but otherwise came out unscathed."

I felt insanely jealous of Ms. Weaver's adventure. "Whenever I'm walking through a new neighborhood, I feel absolutely high." I told her. "Do you feel that way?"

"Oh yeah!” she said. “You can go like ten stops on the subway and feel like you've discovered another country. I think if you're a person who's curious, this is the best place you can live."

When I asked Ms. Weaver to name some favorite stores, however, she paused for a long time.

"You only went to 14,000 shops!" I pressed. "Pick one!"

Among her finds: Tools for Working Wood, a Greenwood Heights shop making and selling woodworking tools that no longer exist based on designs found in old books and manuals.

Then there's The Compleat Sculptor, a sculpting supply store in Manhattan, and Frag Farm in Staten Island, specializing in live aquarium coral.

But best part is the vibes. Especially in the outer boroughs, she said, NYC still boasts many mom-and-pop retail strips—and they are bustling. She was flabbergasted, for example, by Rockaway Parkway at the end of the L line in Canarsie.

"I was blown away by how many people were out shopping. They were talking on the sidewalk. They were getting coffee. They were doing their grocery shopping at the vegetable stand. They were going to the beauty supply and they even have a children's clothing store,” she said. “They had literally everything within walking distance.”

"I thought I was going to the middle-of-nowhere," she continued. "And I got there, and I was like, 'How dare I consider this the middle-of-nowhere? Nothing in New York City is the middle-of-nowhere, right?’"

Ms. Weaver recently finished walking the southeast half of Brooklyn. Once she's covered the eastern halves of Queens and the Bronx, the directory will be complete! But it's already a bonkers accomplishment.

To create the directory's taxonomy, Ms. Weaver turned to an unusual source for inspiration: "The first thing I researched was old Yellow Pages books," she said. "I went to the library."

She relied on Yellow Pages categories and added many more based on her street survey. Users can browse 21 main categories and 222 subcategories including spray paint, modest clothing, uniforms, billiards, wigs, pianos, exotic animals, crystals, Guatemalan food and funeral supplies. Soon to come: Indian formal wear.

Most folks, however, use the site to discover interesting shops in specific neighborhoods, said Ms. Weaver.

I tried this myself. For this newsletter’s next community profile, for example, I'm planning to write about Coney Island. Using the directory, I discovered in advance that the neighborhood boasts a custom sign shop, a Russian gift store, a bait shop and many, many, many, many liquor stores.

Ms. Weaver's aim: to make it easier for people to shop local.

"People have lost touch with how fun shopping can be—that just going out and buying basic things can be really enjoyable," she said. "That's why independent shops exist. You go in and you learn something, and you talk to your neighbors, and you leave feeling good."

So how is the Locavore Guide faring? Traffic is modest so far, averaging 300 visitors a day. Ms. Weaver said she's had trouble getting the word out.

"I really believe in this work and I believe that it needs to exist," said Ms. Weaver. "But I don't know that I've ever had to work so hard to convince other people of that. So it's a little disheartening sometimes."

She's persevering in hopes that her effort will get everyone choosing local over online a little more often. "I think that this city would be just a much richer place if everybody did—at a minimum—ten percent more shopping in their neighborhood shops,” she said. "Going to a shop, you have to be friendly. You have to talk to people. You have to put on real clothes. I think it's good for everybody—to have a random conversation, just for fun, with someone you meet in a shop. There's so much to be said about that!"

Ms. Weaver's latest project—The Locavore Variety Store, which she opened two weeks ago on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village—is perhaps her least quixotic.

Located in a former smoothie shop in a 600-square-foot space she's renting for $10,000 a month, it mainly features merchandise made within 100 miles of NYC—roughly 700 products from 130 local brands.

You can buy a $268 French hair pin made in Manhattan or a $4.79 packet of Hudson Valley seeds; a toenail clipper manufactured in Troy or a tube of sunscreen made in Rockaway Beach.

Ms. Weaver knows how hard it is to run a profitable store in NYC. Most fail within two years. "But honestly, I just really missed being the shopkeeper a lot," she said. "I missed having a space that was mine, that I could welcome other people into and create community around.”

She was also annoyed by the fact that many interesting products made in NYC were only available online. "It seems strange to order something that ships from Brooklyn to my apartment in Manhattan, and I didn't want to do that anymore," she said. "So the shop is quite self-indulgent. It's basically all the things I want to buy."

That includes prayer candles from a factory in Gowanus, pencils from Jersey City's General Pencil Company (the nation’s oldest pencil factory), and Andrew's Honey harvested entirely from Manhattan rooftop hives.

A favorite find: Pizza Suds, an "extremely effective" dish soap developed for Italian restaurants and pizzerias by Glissen Chemical, a family-owned factory tucked into a residential swath of Borough Park.

Pizza Suds!

What it doesn't have: online ordering. If you want to shop the Locavore Variety Store, you have to get dressed and leave your apartment.

"This whole thing is about shopping local, in-person, talking to your neighbors and having a good time," she said. "I want this shop to be fun for people. So they come in here and they're like, 'Oh, this is great! I had a great time! Where else can we go now?’"

What’s your favorite shop in your neighborhood and/or all of NYC? Declare your love in the comments!

QUARTERLY REPORT

Growing Like Corn in the Concrete Jungle!

Dear Reader,

I am pleased to report that over the last fiscal quarter, CAFÉ ANNE revenue beat analyst expectations, rising 262%, year-over-year, to $26 billion. The market cap, meanwhile, now exceeds $3 trillion.

Oh wait, Substack the Cockroach Intern just informed me that these stats are the results for NVIDIA, not CAFÉ ANNE. I am always getting the two confused!

Okay. Here are the correct stats: total subscriptions rose from 11,630 on April 1 to 12,760 as of this morning. That is a nice 10% jump in three months. Thanks to all the folks who forward the newsletter to their friends and share it on the socials. It really helps!

As you know, CAFÉ ANNE has no paywalls ever—everyone who opts for a paid subscription does so just to be a sweetheart and support my work. So I am pleased that I now have 392 paid subscribers—although that is a very small increase from the 383 I had at the start of the quarter. (I was mystified, btw, when I went three weeks without getting a single new paid subscription last month before realizing I’d been forgetting to put the “subscribe” button in the email footer.)

The top-performing issues last quarter, meanwhile, were also three of my favorites:

1. ”I Ate Nothing But Dog Food for Seven Days Straight!” (Which a lot of you thought was an April Fool’s joke but it wasn’t).

2. ”New York’s Favorite Neighborhood is Very, Very Odd” (A profile of Meadowmere, in Queens).

3. ”15 Young New Yorkers Share Their Favorite Slang” (This one was so much fun to report!)

The worst performer? “Meet New York’s Biggest Multitaskers,” which some readers said was too overwhelming to endure.

Finally, if you are still reading this update, you are probably a fan of the newsletter, so perhaps you’d like to support, if you aren’t already.

And have I got a deal for you! This week only, you can get a 20% discount off the price of a subscription to a newsletter you’re already reading for free! I know, I can’t believe it either. But go ahead. Do it.

CAFÉ ANNE is a free weekly newsletter created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday!