“For every store, there is a family, an entrepreneur, even an executive grieving the closing of those doors.”
After New York magazine published a cover story cataloging 500 notable New York City businesses that shuttered for good during the pandemic, writer and director Julio Vincent Gambuto wrote about the heartbreaking loss that happens behind the scenes for entrepreneurs and their families. His own father’s entrepreneurial woes were one of the foundational experiences of his childhood, he writes, one that still seeps into his work as a film director. “Despite our family’s best efforts to save my father’s quest for the American dream from devolving into an American nightmare, we lost that business,” he recalls. “We would go on to lose four more, year after year, as my father struggled to stem the bleeding with an annual venture and a new set of business cards.”
