Hi everyone! I’m Juan and I’m from Yonkers (north of the Bronx). I’m on the pre-med track and I am planning on majoring in biology, obtaining the public policy certificate and minoring in Spanish. I live and I will die by the stethoscope – I can’t see myself doing anything but medicine. I am especially interested in internal medicine, preventive care and health care policy making. I’m also an avid reader of the NYT and I loooove the works of George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Shawn Otto, Joseph Heller and Franz Kafka. I enjoy jogging and cycling even in freezing weather and I chew a ridiculous amount of Spearmint gum.
The storefront business I chose to focus on is a bakery called Orza in my hometown of Yonkers. It’s a charming family-owned small business in my neighborhood that has been in operation in Yonkers since 1908, producing a wide variety of bread that preserves the traditional taste of Italian artisans. For most of the twentieth century, it was an Italian-owned bakery in a predominantly Italian and Portuguese neighborhood. However, at the turn of the century, downtown Yonkers, which encompasses my neighborhood, experienced a significant amount of “white flight.” Immigrants hailing from Spanish-speaking countries subsequently poured into the neighborhood and today make up a majority of its residents.
The Mexican Tovar family became the owners and operators of Orza in 2001, fulfilling their version of the American Dream. The owners, Vital and Ubaldo Tovar, are both extraordinarily hospitable, skilled and affable. We know Vital and Ubaldo personally. They know my parents, my sister and I by name and they have even invited us to Orza’s one-hundred-year anniversary celebration in 2008, which was truly an honor to attend.
My family has been buying bread and sweets from Orza Bakery since we moved into the neighborhood in 1998. We frequent the bakery quite often and we have made special orders of cakes and other sweets for the holidays. I personally love going to Orza – as I write this, I can almost smell the freshly baked bread and pastries they sell. We exclusively give Orza our business when it comes to baked goods, which is great, as Orza is a small business that gives back to charitable causes in our community and supports the local economy. In sum, I am very proud of supporting Orza by virtue of the fact that it is a small independently-owned business, because of its rich history and because its baked goods are unmatched in price and in their appeal to my palate.
