BY JANEL BLADOW | Anyone who has ventured along South Street between the Paris Café at Peck Slip and Pier 17 at the head of Fulton Street knows that this two-block strip has long been dirty, desolate, disgusting and at times dangerous. Even when the Fulton Fish Market was still in business, most tourists and neighbors avoided the area.
Three years before the fish market moved out, Marco Pasanella saw potential in this world of fish, odors and trash, and wanted in. He bought a building at 115 South St. and began renovating the top floors into a living/work space, where he would continue his successful career as a high-end designer of hotels and housewares.
When the fish monger who had inhabited the space for decades moved out, Pasanella began jackhammering the building’s concrete ground floor and looking for a more compatible tenant. When shady characters who wanted to open nightclubs, after-hour bars or restaurants were the only ones interested in the space, Pasanella, who had zero experience in the wine retail business, decided to take the plunge and open a store of his own that he called “Pasanella & Son, Vintners.”
By that time, he was hooked on the neighborhood.
“I hadn’t been to the Seaport since a fourth-grade field trip,” said Pasanella, while seated in the brick-walled backroom overlooking a pocket garden of his enoteca (the Italian word for wine shop).
“But when I came down here and saw the area, I was taken,” he recalled. “It just draws you. It was right by the water, has the Brooklyn Bridge, has all this stuff going on, and some of these old buildings just looked like diamonds in the rough.”
It didn’t seem to take a genius to see that the neighborhood had something special going for it, Pasanella added.
“I wasn’t so crazy about the smell but really loved the culture of the fish market and the characters,” he said. “That whole ‘Gangs of New York’ — the guys with the hooks over their shoulders and the big rubber boots, forklifts and the skids at night and the yelling. I felt sometimes as if I was on the set of a movie about New York.
“This was a New York I had never experienced, and I grew up here!” said Pasanella, who grew up on the Upper East Side and summered in Italy.
He and his wife’s South Street Seaport escapade was filled with characters, discoveries and mishaps. The day they brought their baby son Luca home from the hospital, one local tried to hustle Pasanella for $5 to park the car until another fish guy waved him off. “When he said I was one of them,” he said, “I knew I arrived.”
So when an agent approached him to write book about his experiences, Pasanella jumped right in and recently penned “Uncorked: My Journey Through the Crazy World of Wine,” and got it published through Random House.
Pasanella said the adventure of buying a building and opening a retail store was more daunting in retrospect.
“At first, we were just caught up in the, ‘Wow, this is a great building, it will make a great place to live, a great place to work.’ Then you get in deeper.”
He conceived the wine shop idea a few years later, once the fish guys left, he said.
“We had a big mortgage and we always drank a fair share of wine, and that’s when I noticed there wasn’t really a good wine shop within a mile of here.”
Now six years later, there are several of them in the area.
Pasanella compared the experience of opening the building to being in a Kafka play.
“You are sucked into something you don’t really understand or know the reasons for, [and you don’t know], the way out, either,” he said. “The most terrifying part was thinking, ‘Oh my god, I could be spinning around in this vortex forever.’
What Pasanella enjoys most about his job is interacting with the local community.
“I love when people come in and say [things like], ‘I’ve lived on John Street five years and never knew about this place,’” he said. “I love when they discover this backroom, discover the selection, discover our own label wines — which we did to have something really nice for around $10 a bottle,” he said.
Pasanella’s professional journey in starting a business and authoring a book wasn’t planned out, he noted, and was full of misadventures that entailed one mistake after another.
“Somehow, I managed to get to a place where I’m much happier and living a more fulfilling life — not that I didn’t have a good life as a designer,” he said.
One of the most surprising things Pasanella failed to recognize until he wrote his book, he said, is that it’s not about the wine but about the neighborhood and the people who live there.
“With several hundred people stopping by and saying hi,” he said, smiling, “there’s a level of satisfaction that’s much more — I know it sounds hokey from a New Yorker’s perspective — but it’s one of the best things about the store.”
