Last month, NY1 For You was approached by a Manhattan food vendor who feared new street plantings would force him to move from his location of almost 20 years and build his business from scratch. NY1's Monica Brown filed a follow-up report on how the vendor was able to negotiate to stay.
Last month, a visitor to Muhamed Hussein's food cart in Chelsea, Manhattan turned out not to be a customer, but rather a bearer of very bad news.
“He said. ‘Listen, you have to move from here. We have to make 40 trees around the building,’" said Hussein.
With no other space available in the immediate area, Hussein would be leaving behind a loyal customer base built over nearly two decades.The trees are part of a capital improvement plan enacted by the Chelsea Improvement Company. Initially, company representatives offered to leave space for Hussein's cart by planting one tree about a foot north of where they'd originally planned, but they reversed their position and insisted that Hussein had to go.
“His cart's just too big for the space exactly where he is now,” said Ben Donsky of the CIC at the time.
After NY1 aired its first story on Hussein on December 4, representatives from the Chelsea Improvement Company visited Hussein's cart and they worked out a compromise.
“Everything is okay now, thank God,” says the vendor.
Hussein says CIC officials told him, “'We don't like you to kick you out from here. We just need to make the cart a little bit up, because there's a fence for trees here.’ And they bring for me the wood, too!”
The wheels of Hussein's cart now rest atop several wood boards, raising the floor of the cart above the fence bordering the neighboring tree. At long last, Hussein is certain that his business is safe.
“I appreciate Channel 1 because without Channel 1, I can't do nothing,” says Hussein.
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