Bob Levy, 62, is the fourth-generation owner of Harris Levy, a high-end linens store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He holds down a full-time job as a paramedic. He’s been juggling the two vocations for more than 30 years, at St. Vincent’s Hospital and other organizations, while his wife, Meryl, 60, manages the store. Meryl has worked at Harris Levy since she and Bob were dating in college.
Bob’s paramedic job has provided health benefits for the family of five (except for a short stretch when he worked part-time), plus an income that has enabled them to keep their historic business afloat in tough times.
In the late 1800s, Bob’s great- grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from an area they called Russia-Poland (because of shifting borders) with the hope of selling piece goods. His great-grandfather got sick on the ship, however, so his great-grandmother started the business from a pushcart on Orchard Street in 1894.
“They were successful enough to eventually rent out a basement store on Hester Street, and for 122 years, we’ve been in four places in a six-block radius,” Bob says. His grandfather and great-uncle were the second generation to run the store, and then the third generation—his father and a cousin—took over. The store is located on Forsyth Street in a building that once was an elegant catering hall. The family also owns an attached building around the corner on Grand Street (Harris Levy’s previous location), which they rent out.
As a kid, Bob worked in the store folding towels. In 1975, as a senior at Brooklyn College, he got his first job as a paramedic and helped his father in the family business. “When I had down periods at work, I was able to do more in the store,” he says.
Bob says if there’s one thing he’s proud of, it’s that he’s been able to roll with the punches, and there have been a few. By the 1960s the neighborhood had changed, and it became harder to make a living. The store branched out to middle-of-the-line sheets until competitors like Bed Bath and Beyond, and later Amazon, made it cost-prohibitive to compete.
After a recession hit in the 1990s, Bob’s father and cousin decided to have a 100-year anniversary party and close the store, but their customers were so crestfallen that Bob and Meryl stayed on after the third generation retired. (The third generation kept ownership of the buildings on Grand and Forsyth Streets, however.)
In the next decade, the 9/11 attacks left their mark on the Lower East Side. Bob had been thinking about expanding, but business fell 80% after the terrorist attacks. Instead, he talked Meryl into downsizing and changing the store into a boutique based in a different part of the building that looked out onto a park. “It was the only time we disagreed about something,” he says. To keep the store in business after the attacks, Bob worked a lot of overtime at his job at St. Vincent’s Hospital, which has since closed.
The couple have diversified the business in the last few years, adding stuffed animals, room fragrances and umbrellas, for example. They’ve always catered to women ages 40 to 60, but now they get more people from the neighborhood stopping in with baby strollers, as well as young men, who never took an interest in fine linen in past years.
Bob has held three paramedic jobs since St. Vincent’s. He does only supervisory work now and likes the mix of the two occupations. He’s frustrated to have little time for the store, however. “We could be doing better with the web and social media,” he says, adding that he hasn’t been able to do anything related to advertising recently, either. He’s hoping his youngest daughter, Jillian, 26, who works in the store part-time, will help with the more technical areas and perhaps take over when he and Meryl retire.
That would be in keeping with tradition, Bob says. “My great-grandmother started the business, and my wife runs it now. We wouldn’t be in business if not for her, so it’s matriarchal again.”
Patricia Olsen is a freelance business writer based in New Jersey.
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