Now You're Cooking! - How Community Works!

How Community Works!

By Jane Weston Wilson

"If we fight for justice of any kind, we change ourselves and those around us."

 - Doris "Granny D" Haddock

Here is a full circle story about how community works. It started this spring.

In the May 6 edition of The West Side Spirit, there was a story by reporter Dan Rioli about Anne Cottavoz, owner of Columbus Natural Food. She had organized support in her effort to save four small businesses on her block between 95th and 96th streets, coming under threat from the landlord’s proposal to increase commercial space at Columbus House.

Four-thousand customers signed petitions to save not only the already existing stores, but also to prevent the landlord from cutting into the spacious, wide sidewalks that add beauty to the neighborhood.

Something I could do was to write about it, which I did in my May 17 column called Where Have All the Stores Gone. This subject sadly gets frequent coverage. In all our neighborhoods from Columbus to Broadway, we have seen stores we love shuttered, depriving store-owners and their workers of their livelihoods and customers of their convenience and congeniality.

In E. B. White’s book Here in New York he described community as “every block where customers and storekeepers know each other’s names."

We were galvanized by Anne’s effort and conviction as well as local organizations to join in and fight for the humanity of our neighborhood.

What could we do?

The first step: Anne told us to attend Community Board 7's June 1 meeting and to speak to the issues we were defending. We did, and there were lots of us. The thirty-five members listened to the landlord’s company's proposal and then to our impassioned pleas for protecting our neighborhood. At the end of their 3-month deliberation, Community Board 7 voted down the landlord's company plan finding it “fundamentally flawed and could be a misuse of the new zoning laws.” However, Community Board 7 could only recommend its findings to the City Planning Commission, chaired by Amanda Burden, who would have the final say.

We were urged to write to her directly, and many of us wrote individual personal from-the-heart letters, which we believed could possibly make a difference in the outcome. Anne has a folder of these letters. As emails flew back and forth, many others showed up at every meeting where Gale Brewer or Scott Stringer were talking about neighborhood issues.

In the August 26 issue of The West Side Spirit in the Express Column the headline read, "Columbus Retail Plan Nixed."  We had come full circle.

As all of us at Aging in Action know so well, we must continue our fight to keep our city, this thriving metropolis, from turning into a new kind of ghost town of look-alike malls, and empty stores. 

"When we stand for justice we change ourselves and those around us," sometimes one street at a time.
 Instead of recipes, which usually follow here, I would like to encourage readers to shop at Columbus Natural Food at 725 Columbus Avenue.

When I talked to Anne, she told me that she grew up in France, on a farm near Toulouse, and that she knew at 18 she always wanted to be involved with food. She won Bachelor and Masters degrees in Agricultural Economics. She married and came to this country in 1984 where she continued to pursue knowledge in every aspect involving food and health. In 1994 she opened her store. In those early years Anne said, “I held seminars featuring herbalists and nutritionists often with as many as 80 people in attendance”

This interest in her customers, and how to help them make informed choices in a way that can support good health, has always been her passion.

The Columbus Natural Food store is both welcoming and orderly; in the way it is laid out, and how every single shelf has been setup for the ease and convenience of customers. The people who work with Anne share her interest in customers. When I’m in the check-out line, there are always animated conversations going on. Sometimes I’ll stand right on the spot and enjoy a fresh vegetable or fruit drink. I always take home Cascadian Farms Organic Frozen Cherries from Washington State. They make perfect little popsicles.

So tell us, what's your favorite neighborhood place?