Artisan Landlord is Helping Keep Bushwick Restaurant Scene Alive

New York residents interested in achieving detente with either tenant or landlord may want to examine what looks to be something of a “Model UN” of Covid-era property relations right here in Bushwick. Two of its member nations, located on Troutman St between Wycoff and Saint Nicholas, are Lot 45 (a club), Union Pizza Works (a restaurant). Between the two sits a third: Quebracho Inc., a frame-making studio handling prestigious clients owned by Argentinian-Italian artisan Marcelo Bavaro and Angel Campagnale, the men to whom the restaurants write their rent checks. Over the last eight months, this crack quartet – a slice of modern Bushwick par excellence –  has presented what looks, at least from the outside, to be a real estate case study in the value of empathy and communication. Because, if while the country squats mired in a once-in-a-generation health & economic crisis the government merely sits twiddling its upholstered leather thumbs, those qualities can mean the difference between survival and extinction – and have for Marcelo’s tenants, whose regular communiques meant the waiving of multiple months’ rent.