The other day I went to Sonbob’s—the long name is Sonnie’s Bits & Bobs—a little neighborhood café on 28th Avenue between 33rd and 34 Streets in Astoria, Queens. It’s my older brother’s favorite spot. I brought him in a wheelchair, because he was tired and it was hot. 

Sonnie, the owner, pronounced saw-nee, is a Korean woman of 60. She’s an actor. When not acting, she makes most of the food, including fresh baked muffins and cupcakes. She’s sometimes friendly, sometimes reserved, but she knows me and my brother, and satisfied my life’s ambition to go to a place in the nabe that I could walk into and have someone ask me, “The regular?”  She always remembers what I love: a Cuban sandwich on a fresh croissant, with ham and pickle. The napkins she brings us are bandanas of different colors.

Her coffee’s excellent. Old jazz plays softly in the background. Sometimes a local musician plays in the evening or someone reads poetry. She let my brother and his friend Mary read the entire Rime of the Ancient Mariner one evening to a packed audience of several people. It was something he had always wanted to do.

She also finds a variety of things to sell cheaply: costume jewelry, plates, sunglasses, scarves, dresses, washcloths! I found a book there by a local writer for my grandson about a friendly worm. Many of Sonnie’s items come from a store in the theater district that sells props and odds and ends left over from TV and theater productions. 

There were no other customers for a few moments the day I brought my brother. I liked that because he loves to start conversations with strangers, which makes me cringe. Sonnie came and sat with us while we ate. I asked her if she was acting in anything, and she said no, a bit crossly. She doesn’t like to be asked that, she told me. Because of the “asshole president” and the defunding of the National Council on the Arts, new theater productions aren’t happening much and there are few jobs for actors and theater workers, she said. The wealthy people who help finance new productions are worried about the economy and are holding on to their money.

I told her I keep expecting the economy to crash, but she corrected me: money has been trickling away from people for a long time. Things are getting tougher and tougher. The rent on her cafe will be going up in another year or two, and she probably won’t be able to afford to stay; the cafe barely survived the last increase. It’s hard physical work to run the place, and she doesn’t know how long she’ll have the energy to do it solo. Her dream, she told me, is that someone will come along and buy it from her. “But it wouldn’t look like your place anymore,” my brother said.

Losing Sonbob’s will be a blow to my brother and others in the neighborhood. It makes me feel bleak, the disappearance away of places like this, even though I know it’s been happening for a while now. When I first moved to the Upper West Side in 1995, there was a little store that sold candy, comic books and old opera scores on Amsterdam between 93rd and 94th. Then one day it wasn’t there. 

Small places like that, whose owners have scraped by for years and added a spark of their own to their communities– such as a well-thumbed opera score; fresh baked mango blueberry muffins; or the best goddam Cuban sandwich in the city—are going, going, gone.

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Nancy Stiefel is a psychoanalyst living in Queens.