Aliyya Swaby Photo
Booted businessman Ernesto Garcia was back selling arepas on York Street during the Thursday lunch wave — just not at the same spot as before.
Garcia and his workers Thursday afternoon served the students and local workers who managed to find the new location for his Ay! Arepa cart — the southwest corner of the York and Elm intersection in front of the former J. Press building—a week after city Building Official Jim Turcio ordered him to move his truck due to a zoning violation. It turned out Ay! Arepa’s previous location, the northeast corner of York & Broadway/Elm, was technically in a residential zone.
The crackdown, which affected four food carts and trucks, sparked a broader community discussion about the role of mobile food providers in town.
In independent interviews, Garcia and fellow vendor Carlos Mendez said Turcio gave their workers a one-hour limit to leave the space; Turcio and the city said in a release that they did not give the vendors a time limit.
Garcia, the owner of Ay! Arepa and restaurant Rubamba, met with Turcio Wednesday to look at a map he office prepared of which areas were zoned for business, instead of residential.
The space Turcio found is in front of where J. Press used to stand before the building was demolished. Turcio said it is the only parking spot legally available on the block for a food vendor — otherwise the area reverts to a residential zone by Yale’s Pierson College.
Ay! Arepa’s new space is kitty-corner from the old one — not very far. But Garcia said he still wants his old space back
“I’ve been there for a long time. I’m sure right now a lot of people don’t know that I’m here,” he said. Yale students have been helping him get petition signatures to pressure the city to let him to return across the street.
Starting around noon Thursday, Yale students lined up with their own containers to buy $5 arepas. One group of five students ordered the chorizo arepa, as they do every week, Garcia said. “I felt bad when they came last week and couldn’t buy them.”
Ryan Burningham (pictured), a Yale law student, said he would have to walk “another 100 feet” to get to the new location, but was otherwise unaffected by the change. He buys food from Ay! Arepa or other local food carts every other day.
One man bought an arepa for the first time, though he said he lives and works in the area. “I never saw it” when it was further down York, he said.
“All you have to do is come in” to his city office for advice on where to locate a cart or food truck legally, Turcio said. He said that if J. Press does begin construction on a new building on York Street, Garcia would have to move again, because he’d be in construction zone.
George Koutroumanis, manager of Yorkside Pizza & Restaurant a block north, called the vendors unfair competition for “brick-and-mortar” business such as his own, in part because of their low operation costs and alleged penchant for sidestepping regulations.
But, he stressed, he never sought to get the city to shut them down. (Turcio said in general the bulk of complaints about food vendors come form competing vendors who follow the rules.) “Everyone has a right to earn a living,” Koutroumanis said. “The vendors have been in town for 10 years. If they’re breaking the law, maybe the city is at fault for not” enforcing it then.
“I never called anyone to complain,” he said.
People have called his business threatening to boycott it because of his public remarks about the subject and because of the mistaken interpretation that he had made calls to the city. “It’s disheartening to see how people take things out of context,” he said.