Whassup With Zito?

It was hard enough when the glorious Bleeker Street bakery A. Zito & Sons closed in 2004. But somehow it's a little harder to walk by it every time I'm in the Village and see it still standing vacant, its fine little storefront put to no good use. It just sits there, a painful reminder of what was and what's lost.

Tired of looking at the "For Lease" sign in the window, I called the number listed to ask what was going on. The quite nice and cooperative man on the other end of the phone said the lease to Zito had been sold to a small company which was shortly thereafter gobbled up by a bigger company. The bigger company has since proved "difficult" and sits on its hands and matters have come to a standstill. The real estate company listed on the sign has no control over the situation now, the man said. He knows the empty space bothers locals and he fields calls about it fairly often.