Today we witnessed the renaming of East 5 street to Adela Fargas way. Adela was a woman of great substance who embodied what this community is all about. pic.twitter.com/2T98GSO4UQ
— NYPD 9th Precinct (@NYPD9Pct) September 17, 2022
Couldn’t have picked a more beautiful day to celebrate the legacy of Adela Fargas 🇵🇷❤️ Casa Adela is more than a restaurant to us; it’s long been and always will be the heart of our Loisaida community. I’m so proud to honor Adela and her family with this street co-naming. pic.twitter.com/frniQG92Mm
— Carlina Rivera 利華娜 (@CarlinaRivera) September 17, 2022
Today we are at the co-naming of Adela Fargas Way, who was the late & famed proprietor of the cultural anchor & eatery, Casa Adela. Adela was a proud Afro-Puerto Rican woman, an artist in her own right who created authentic sancocho and community alike. pic.twitter.com/BabpaFEACS
— The Clemente (@the_clemente) September 17, 2022
Adela Fargas was a working-class, Afro-Puerto Rican fixture in Loisaida and the owner and matriarch behind the iconic and authentic Puerto Rican restaurant Casa Adela. She was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, where she became a domestic worker who prepared frianbreras, or packed lunches, for factory workers.She moved to the United States at age 39, where her first job in the Lower East Side was at a restaurant on East 4th Street and Avenue D. When the restaurant closed, Adela found a way to provide for her family and feed those less fortunate through selling pasteles on street corners. In 1973, Adela opened her family-run restaurant, Casa Adela.Adela Fargas's impact goes far beyond a restaurant, which represented an important meeting place for the Puerto Rican community in New York City, in the diaspora, and worldwide. Outside the restaurant's walls, Adela was a center of Latino life on the Lower East Side and a tireless community advocate. Adela became the godmother to many on the Lower East Side, employing those who lived in the neighborhood and feeding anyone who came in hungry.Her soul food attracted a profound sense of community and this street co-naming will serve to honor her living legacy. Each year at the Loisaida Festival, Adela provided food for the community and organized dance and music for the festival as well.
Photo from May by Stacie Joy
Adela Fargas was a working-class, Afro-Puerto Rican fixture in Loisaida and the owner and matriarch behind the iconic and authentic Puerto Rican restaurant, Casa Adela. She was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, where she became a domestic worker who prepared frianbreras, or packed lunches, for factory workers.She moved to the United States at age 39, where her first job in the Lower East Side was at a restaurant on East 4th Street and Avenue D. When the restaurant closed, Adela found a way to provide for her family and feed those less fortunate through selling pasteles on street corners. In 1973, Adela opened her family-run restaurant, Casa Adela.Adela Fargas's impact goes far beyond a restaurant, which represented an important meeting place for the Puerto Rican community in New York City, in the diaspora, and worldwide. Outside the restaurant's walls, Adela was a center of Latino life on the Lower East Side and a tireless community advocate. Adela became the godmother to many on the Lower East Side, employing those who lived in the neighborhood and feeding anyone who came in hungry.Her soul food attracted a profound sense of community and this street co-naming will serve to honor her living legacy. Each year at the Loisaida Festival, Adela provided food for the community and organized dance and music for the festival as well.
“Adela was like my mom,” he said. “This restaurant is like people’s second home.” But, Malu cautioned, the dispute between the restaurant and its landlord wasn’t the old story of a big, bad developer kicking out a neighborhood joint. “You can’t just say, ‘Oh, this is gentrification,’ ” he said. “It’s not.”
The building, as much as the restaurant, was part of the Puerto Rican community’s legacy in the neighborhood. Malu gestured toward a blue-and-white tile mural above the building’s front door, which read “66 Ave C Homesteaders.” “These people, actually, with their own hands, helped to restore this building,” he said. “And that’s important for people to know.”
Gladys Duran, the board president, was born and raised in Loisaida, while Eva Eumana was born in Mexico, and Maria Peralta in Nicaragua. All three had been in the building since the nineteen-nineties, when sweat equity was still expected of new residents. Eumana, who works as a housekeeper, did cleaning work at other HDFC buildings to contribute her share.
In 2018, the board members said, the prior board president met a real-estate broker named Aretha Busby at a seminar for small landlords held at City Hall. The building hired Busby to write a report about its two commercial spaces — the space not occupied by Casa Adela is currently a bodega — to get a sense of how much more money it could be charging.
The building then hired [real-estate lawyer Gregory] Byrnes, who took a look at its management and finances and was appalled by what he found. Byrnes was told that the building needed hundreds of thousands of dollars for capital repairs to address issues with the roof and the boilers, and, Byrnes said, to pay for a management company and a superintendent. The co-op was operating at a deficit each year, and its reserve fund was depleting. Byrnes had helped the residents reduce the size of the board, from every resident in the building to the current three members, to aid in decision-making, and was preparing to help them sell a couple of vacant apartments, which will be listed at only a “fraction” of the market rate, he said, in keeping with the building’s history. Raising the rent on the storefronts was needed to make up for the money the building wasn’t getting elsewhere. It had to come from somewhere.
The old lease expired a few years ago. Under it, they were paying $1350 per month for the 715 sq ft space. They offered their landlord, a limited equity HDFC cooperative, that they would start to pay $3000 per month, plus 3% increases for each year for 10 years. The landlord refused the offer: their bottom line is $4000 in year one (backdated to august) and $6,750 starting in year two of the lease, and 3% increases after that, which is a 480%+ increase in rent and sure to force the business to close.On Thursday, community members met at the restaurant and created a Save Casa Adela Committee.
The entire LES & PR/Latino community came out tonight to pay our final respects to one of the LES matriarchs: #AdelaFargas from #CasaAdela — having a meal at Casa Adela meant that your soul, heart and belly would be filled with love as well as authentic PR cooking. QueDescansePaz pic.twitter.com/rk3hxhzGnQ
— Rosie Mendez (@RosieMendez) January 20, 2018
“She makes people feel like they are eating from Grandma’s hand,” he said. “Many people, their grandmothers are back home,” he said, meaning in Puerto Rico. “So they come here.”
The grandmother who makes the rice and beans — a great-grandmother, actually — was visible through Casa Adela’s window, with its gold script proclaiming “Authentic Puerto Rican Cuisine Since 1976.” She is Adela Ferguson, 79, and she was checking the timer on a 1950s-era rotisserie oven, with eight whole chickens, golden and peppery spices flecking the crisping skin as they rotated slowly — seven more minutes until perfection.
