Business

NEW YORK — Ground Zero is clean of debris. The stock market is up. And even the hawkers of Sept. 11 memorabilia are few and far between.

Yet there's no rejoicing among the small businesses struggling to survive in the back streets around the World Trade Center site, where so many others have gone out of business.

They've seen few of the good times washing through global financial services firms that populate lower Manhattan.

On Liberty Street, a few yards from the site, Essex World Cafe is working out how to survive on a business volume well below the level five years ago, said owner Vivia Amalfitano. The deli, which was severely damaged in the fall of the towers, took a further hit when it was converted to an emergency medical center after the attack. It reopened in 2003.

One block away, Mike Keane, 43, owner of O'Hara's Restaurant and Pub, estimated that business is down 40 percent from pre-Sept. 11 levels.

The bar, a block from the foot of the WTC site, was pummeled with debris and choked with dust when the towers fell. It was closed for six months while Keane and his partner at the time, Connie Smith, renovated the interior and patched a large hole in the roof.

Worse than the damage, a chunk of their customers disappeared for good.

“We figured the first year was going to be tough, and then after that it was going to get better,” said Keane. “But it didn't.”

Part of that is due, of course, to the absence of the tens of thousands of World Trade Center workers. Business also has been hurt by O'Hara's location next to a building formerly occupied by Deutsche Bank, which has been empty since the attacks because of damage and environmental contamination.

Workmen excavating adjacent streets, closing the block off for months at a time, also have kept customers from his door, Keane said.

“We actually get more tourist business now than before,” he said. But tourists don't spend as much as office workers and businessmen, he said.

A few blocks away, Gabe Abouzid — owner of Lane Cafe on Maiden Lane — mulled the changes that came with the attacks, most of them for the worse.

Abouzid said the increased security at most downtown office buildings has significantly stifled business.

Deliverymen can no longer just walk into the buildings. They have to wait for the customer to come out to pick up their food.

“Sometimes the customer is available, sometimes not,” said Abouzid, 50. “Sometimes they get busy and the delivery boy comes back (to the cafe) with the food.”

The cafe also has been hurt by the downtown shift toward residential development. Residents don't eat out as often as office workers.

Four blocks from the World Trade Center site, the cafe suffered little structural damage in the attacks, said Abouzid, an ebullient Egyptian immigrant who coaches high school soccer.

But when Lane Cafe reopened three weeks after Sept. 11, his clientele had all but vanished. Even office workers unaffected by the towers' destruction didn't come around because they couldn't get through the security net around downtown at that time.

Abouzid said he lost almost all his 30 corporate catering contracts because the companies moved away. For a while, the cafe survived on business from the Salvation Army, which paid it to supply food for rescue workers at Ground Zero.

Business was so bad that two years after the attacks Abouzid and his partner considered closing, he said. It's since picked up slowly; revenue is now about 80 percent of the pre-Sept. 11 level. And he's optimistic about the future, especially if the Twin Towers are rebuilt.

“It's coming back,” said Abouzid. “The good days are coming.”