Out and About in the East Village, part 1

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Stephen Shanaghan (pictured right), Arnoldo Caballero
Occupation: Owners, Pangea Restaurant
Location: Pangea, 2nd Avenue between 11th and 12th Street
Time: Wednesday, Feb. 18th at 5:30 pm

Stephen: I’m from Rhode Island. I moved here to go to NYU, where I studied psychology. People always asked me how I got into the restaurant business. I worked in them and Arnoldo worked in restaurants too. We were both going to NYU.

I had to work my way through school and I ended up getting my first restaurant job at Windows on the World. I had to make a fake résumé because I didn’t have any experience. They weren’t very strict about that at the time. I was a waiter. The only other restaurant that I worked in before I opened my own was Central Falls restaurant on West Broadway. The owner catered to the "Saturday Night Live" crew and staff. That’s probably where I got the bug.

Arnoldo: We took a year off and we traveled in Italy. We lived in Rome and Florence and spent loads of time in Sicily and Venice and we came back to America and started looking for jobs. I had majored in art history and I started to look for work and there was nothing available. We had saved just a little bit of money and one day we had this crazy idea.

We had compared Italian food in New York to what we had in Italy and we noticed that it needed an improvement. So we said, ‘Why don’t we do an Italian restaurant?’ We had gone to this restaurant in Sicily called La Spaghetteria, a basic, only pasta restaurant and the food was so amazing. Stephen said, ‘What if we just open a little pasta joint and we’ll call it La Spaghetteria in New York.’

S: We opened in a small storefront on 7th Street, right off of Avenue A, in 1984. We had a little bit of money and we called our friend and said that we wanted to open up a place, and he said, ‘Well what do you know about opening a restaurant?’ So we said, ‘We put ourselves through college working in restaurants, how difficult could it be?’

It was difficult. We were 26. It was spit and glue. We built most of the furniture. It had like 26 seats and a kitchen that only fit one cook and a person who would do dishes and help out. The food was very simple but real and good quality. Everything was cheap because Michael, our chef at the time who lived on Avenue A or B said, 'You’ve got to keep it inexpensive.’ That I think contributed to use becoming successful.

A: We were robbed 3 times. I remember the first time, when Stephen called me up and said, ‘This guy just came in and removed the front doors.’ That was our introduction to the East Village.

S: There were a lot of junkies around. We had one of these hokey alarm systems that would call us at home and say ‘a burglary in progress.’ It was supposed to go to the police station at the same time. It was Thanksgiving and the alarm went off at four in the morning and we both hopped in taxis coming from different directions. We actually cornered him in the middle and he had our big garbage can with the cash register and the mixer.

Arnoldo was trying to see what was taken and I go after the guy and chase him into Tompkins Square Park with some drunk, stoned people walking around. He pulled out an ice pick. No one was helping me. I was yelling out, ‘Help! Help!’ I pulled the [emergency response] box thing and it didn’t work. New York was in the broken state at that time. This junkie’s waving an ice pick at me. ‘Okay, I’m done.’

A: So we decided to get a gate and we called the gate company. This was the third time we had been robbed. And they said, ‘We’re really busy, it’s going to take a week.’ So we had to sleep in the restaurant in the backroom for a week. We called our friends and said, ‘Who wants to sleep with us?’ The landlord would turn off the heat at 1 in the morning and not turn it back on at 6. It was freezing in there. We used to bring our pajamas and keep the lights on and have a party with bottles of wine, just so the robbers wouldn’t come back. Then we would go to the Pyramid and get drunk at happy hour. It was so much fun.

S: [The clientele] was a total mix. Always has been. I always remember one of the first write ups that we had gotten, the writer said, ‘the Wall Streeters sitting next to the librarian, sitting next to the punk rocker.’ There was an article that came out about us in The New York Times and that’s what put us on the map. We opened in May and by the third week the phone just started ringing off the hook and my chef called me up and said, ‘We’re in the Wednesday section of the Times!’

It was this little paragraph that said, ‘La Spaghetteria is the hottest new restaurant downtown.’ It was two sentences. People were afraid to go over there. People were like, ‘Avenue A? Really?’ But they did end up coming over.

Next week: Opening Pangea and having prostitutes as upstairs neighbors

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.