Not in the business plan

Dining at the Kitchenette cafe late last month required more than a good appetite: You also needed a valid photo ID and a police officer's assent.

Squeeze through the police checkpoint up the street, pass the nail salon and shoe store's shuttered metal gates, and you finally reach the place. A couple of blocks from the World Trade Center site, it's the only business that has reopened on this stretch of West Broadway.

Ann Nickinson and her business partner lost $110,000 in revenue and rotted produce during the Kitchenette's four-week closure. A week after reopening, she's determined to stay in business - but isn't so sure how long she can last.

"Small businesses cannot absorb that loss," says Ms. Nickinson as she tends to her only breakfast patrons: New York City police officers.

Nearly two months after the twin towers fell, most of the 7,000 small businesses in lower Manhattan, ranging from restaurants to shoeshine stands, are barely surviving.

With sales down as much as 80 percent and unpaid bills piling up, small-business owners say they're desperate for help from the federal government, which they say has been too slow in acting. After closing their stores for weeks, they returned to find inventories and business records destroyed.

Most customers either died in the attack or have since relocated away from ground zero. Regardless of whether they once worked in - or lived near - the World Trade Center, customers still can't get to the 2,700 small businesses in the "red zone." The area remains sealed off from the public.

Even on streets open to customers, many store owners say their vendors don't want to deal with the traffic hassles, and are reluctant to do business with firms that haven't paid rent or other bills in weeks.

And then there's the basic challenge of figuring out how to run a business without a phone.

"It's a pretend business right now," says Steve Stoppard, manager at the Tribeca Hardware store, whose customers traditionally have been apartment-dwellers looking for house paint or home-improvement tools. Now, he says, they only ask for face masks and air purifiers.

Plenty of pedestrians pass Parry Patel's newstand at the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street. But they're tourists, gawking at the World Trade Center site, rather than the business people who used to buy his newspapers and magazines. "I'm hardly surviving," says Mr. Patel.

Yuriy Davidov, who operates a shoeshine store in the Fulton Street subway station, owes $2,000 in back rent but takes in only $30 a day. His wife lost her job on Sept. 11, when her employer was killed.

The ripples reach far beyond the tip of Manhattan. New Jersey's Commerce and Economic Growth Commission has fielded hundreds of calls from small businesses, including travel agents and limousine services who lost their customers, says spokesperson Karen Wolfe.

Inside the sealed "red zone," business, of course, is far worse. Customers still can't reach Al's Pizzaria, located around the corner from ground zero's edge. Since his regular phone line is out of order, manager Richard Cuffaro provides customers with a cellphone number to call during the one day a week that police allow deliveries.

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