If you have ever stood in line on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint for a doughnut and a coffee, you were standing inside something Donna Siafakas built. Siafakas, who ran Peter Pan Donut and Pastry Shop for 33 years, died on June 30, at 69. On July 8, the shop that felt like it would outlast everyone closed its doors so the block could grieve her.
A handwritten sign went up on the bakery door beneath a drawing of a dove: “To honor our beloved Donna.” Staff, family and customers used the day to pay tribute to the woman who helped make the shop a neighborhood landmark. The recipes and the reputation were the easy part to point at. Donna was the part people meant when they said they loved Peter Pan.
Peter Pan has served Greenpoint since the 1950s, but the version New Yorkers line up for now is the one Donna made. She took over the shop in 1993 and spent more than three decades turning a corner bakery at 727 Manhattan Avenue into a destination people fly in for. She and her husband, Christos, kept it a family business, their sons and Donna’s sister working the counter and the ovens, most of the case still made from the shop’s original recipes.
To the people who worked for her, the shop was Donna. “She really treated us fantastically and that’s where she really earned the title as a second mom to all of us,” waitress Averianna Eisenbach told News 12. Eisenbach also told the station about the day Hollywood called: “When they called her to ask her if they could have permission to put the store in the movie and she was like, ‘What movie?’ And they said, ‘Spiderman,’ and she was like, ‘What are you even asking me for?'” The cameo in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” mattered less to Donna than the proof that the work had paid off.
Customers felt it too. “Everybody who comes here loves it, and it means more to them than the food and obviously she was a huge part of that,” a regular who goes by Smoota told News 12. Gene Golebiewski, a longtime customer, set the loss against a Greenpoint that keeps changing around him: “Donna was a sweetheart. Everybody loved her. Big loss with the neighborhood changing. It’s like another pillar of the neighborhood is gone.“
The tributes came from the people who run the neighborhood and the people who run the shops next door. City Council Member Lincoln Restler said Donna “left an indelible mark in Greenpoint and made our community a much better place.” Tony’s Pizzeria on Nassau Avenue, Dusty Rose Vintage and Van Leeuwen Ice Cream posted that her legacy will always live on. State Assembly member Emily Gallagher, who represents Greenpoint and Williamsburg, called Donna “a community leader and a staple,” according to the Greenpointers newsletter.
Peter Pan has the loyal lines and the “Spider-Man” cameo. It feels permanent. But the warmth people mean when they say they love Peter Pan was a person, and that person was 69. The shop went dark for a day because what it lost cannot be reordered from a supplier.
The lights are coming back on. Employees say there are no plans to close the business, her sons are still running it, and they say they are committed to carrying on her legacy. So the answer to the grief is the one Donna would have recognized: go. Peter Pan Donut and Pastry Shop is open at 727 Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, and the family and staff she treated like her own are still behind the counter. Order the way you always did, tip the person who hands it to you, and keep the line long. Hours are on the shop’s own site. The best tribute to the woman who made a doughnut shop feel like home is to keep showing up to it.
