By Paul Leavoy
While business is thriving at a Centretown storeowner’s native crafts shop, his New York boutique now lies beneath the rubble at ground zero of the World Trade Center attack.
Eight months ago, Valley Eagle Vincent opened the New York native crafts shop, an offshoot of his Beaded Dreams store on Bank Street. The prime new location? The massive shopping concourse between the two now-collapsed central towers of the World Trade Center. What began as a healthy business venture was destroyed in this month’s tragic attacks.
“I was in shock and devastated,” says Vincent of his initial reaction to the attacks. “(The World Trade Center) was a monument and people took it for granted.”
Vincent was in Manhattan at the time of the attack and he watched the second plane hit the south tower on television an hour before he was to leave for work. His two co-workers also escaped the devastation — the store opened daily at 10:30 a.m., an hour-and-a-half after the second impact. “In a way, that saved everybody,” he says.
Vincent opened his store in the World Trade Center to capitalize on a high-volume tourist traffic that passes through the building every day. “I go where the tourists are,” he says.
He also believed the World Trade Center was a unique place.
“You could sit and talk in restaurants on the 67th floor,” he says. “It was something different.”
Beyond the sacrifice of the time and effort he invested in the New York business, Vincent has suffered a large financial loss, at least temporarily. “Getting a shop like that is very expensive,” he said.
He estimates he had spent nearly $50,000 on the New York branch, and now he faces an extended wait while his insurance claim is processed.
Vincent and his Ottawa co-worker, Morning Star, have begun planning for a launch of a similar boutique in the Byward Market.
The papers for the new store were signed only two days before the destruction of the World Trade Center, but this will not affect the opening of the proposed store.
Vincent has no immediate plans to reopen a boutique in the New York area.
In spite of the valuables lost, including an old tomahawk,Vincent is relieved that none of his friends or staff were lost. “There are some things you can’t replace,” he said.
“I’m just happy to be alive.”