No use for nuts as Persian grocer shutters on 30th St.

By Charlotte Cowles

When he first opened his Persian grocery store on West 30th St. nearly two decades ago, Hassan Hassani said the area was ideal for his business. The 74-year-old owner of Pars International Products, who speaks in heavily accented English, said there was a Persian rug store nearby, and many customers would come to the area to buy Middle Eastern products. “All of the places around me were Iranian merchants,” he said. “Very nice place in that time.”

Back then Hassani’s business flourished. “I had a lot of nice customers, very nice people,” he said, gesturing to the rows of jars dotting his fragrant shop, filled with golden prunes, gooey Turkish Delight, California almonds, roasted walnuts and fat, sweet raisins. “They buy a lot of nice dried fruit—very useful for their health, very useful for their children, for old people, for all people.”

Today, however, a series of setbacks and dwindling business have forced Hassani to say goodbye to even his most loyal patrons, who have been stopping in recently to take advantage of his specialty offerings before the shop closes at the end of the month.

Eric Scherzer, 57, is one of these customers. A patron of the store for about 15 years, he said that he and his wife discovered Pars when she worked nearby. When they moved to New Jersey, Hassani would package up dried fruit and nuts to ship to them. “Now I work near here, so I can come to shop,” Scherzer said. “Everything here is much better than anything you can buy anywhere else. You have to try the California apricots.”

One by one, the store became beset with troubles. The Persian rug store moved away a decade ago, and today precious few of those type shops remain from what was once a mecca for Middle Eastern businesses. A police station on the street changed the parking rules so that only police vehicles could park there, making it difficult for Hassani to unload his van or customers to park their cars. A water leakage in the building started damaging large amounts of Hassani’s merchandise, he said, and his insurance refused to pay. Building construction filled the block with dust, driving away patrons. ConEd bills steadily rose from a manageable $300 or $400 per month to an unaffordable $2,000, he said. So at the end of April, Pars will close its doors on 30th St. for good—with no plans to relocate.

“A lot of losses, and no one helped me,” Hassani lamented. “Day by day, a lot of problems, and we cannot continue.”

There is also the question of rent. Hassani currently pays $5,000 per month for his shop, a mid-block space at 145 West 30th St. between Sixth and Seventh Aves. He knows that the stores around him have had their rents raised two- or three-fold, some even quadrupled. It wouldn’t be too long before his business was pushed out no matter what, he said, so he approached his landlord to terminate their contract a year early.

“The area has outgrown the business,” said Justin Derfner of the Feil Organization, who owns the 12-story building where Pars is located on the ground floor. He explained that the rest of the building was changing along with the neighborhood, filling with “higher-grade” tenants such as architecture firms and headquarters for international companies. “It’s a low-margin business,” he said of Hassani’s store. “We’d like the bottom of the building to kind of go along with what’s happening upstairs.”

Ali Ahmed works at Nader Food Market at 1 East 28th St., a few blocks from Hassani’s store, and speaks highly of the place. “I know Mr. Hassani. He is a very good person,” he said adamantly. “I don’t know why he is closing—maybe landlord problems. But he is a very good person. I know his work.” Ahmed is from Bangladesh and also specializes in Persian food products. He said that when his store is running short of merchandise, they sometimes buy it from Hassani.

Amy Sadeghi, a striking 44-year-old woman from New Jersey, has been buying specialty Iranian food at Pars for 10 years. She herself is not Iranian, but her husband is, and he discovered the store one day on his way to a meeting. “You can always find the best nuts and spices,” she said, loading up several brown paper bags full of saffron, pistachios and the specialty Persian spice advieh. “Now they have pomegranate juice everywhere, but they had it here first.”

“Everything is changing,” Hassani said. “All of the small businesses, they cannot be here anymore. They move to Queens, to Brooklyn. They cannot afford to be here anymore.” He pointed to a cluster of students smoking cigarettes on the street outside his store. “They are my main customers now. Why? Because I sell cheap soda, for 75 cents instead of over a dollar. They are not here for my California apricots or my California walnuts.

“Many places these days, they sell garbage,” Hassani added. “It is very difficult to find healthy food these days.” He shook his head wistfully amongst his jars of yogurt, boxes of sesame cookies and tins of pitted dates. “Not just health food, but good food, wonderful food, natural food.”