Indy Bookshops Face Tough Struggle to Survive In a Digital World

By Joseph Kellard


“Do you have any James Patterson?” a customer asked Matt Schab, owner of Lazy Days in Long Beach, last Saturday afternoon.

“I don’t think so — you’ll have to search around,” said Schab, whose independent bookstore has been looking rather disheveled since he announced it will close later this month.

Neon-colored sales signs adorn the store’s front window, and once well-stocked shelves are now much less crowded with books. Lazy Days is the latest casualty among independent booksellers that once peppered the South Shore. Just as record-and-CD stores have been done in by iTunes, book stores have been undercut by the likes of Amazon.com.

Schab, who managed the now nonexistent National Books in Kew Garden Hills before he opened Lazy Days in 2002, admitted that he knew what he was getting into even then, as online bookstores were burgeoning. Few of his early customers went online for books, but as the years passed, fewer of them browsed in his store and schools stopped coming in with reading lists. Schab said that losing half of his special-order business to Amazon.com and eBay hurt his bottom line.

“You do it because you love books,” he said of the store, which offers used books, records, VHS movies, antiques and framed artwork.

While Schab said he will dearly miss his customers, some of whom have become friends, he expressed some relief that he will be taking his books home to sell them online, on Web sites such as abe.com and half.com, while he works at the Long Beach Library and studies for a master’s in library science.

“There’s more money on the Net, and it means less hours for me and more time with my family,” said Schab, who works alone almost daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

But despite the e-book business and Google’s blossoming online library, other independent stores, new and old, are finding ways to survive. Last summer, Tim Schmidt took the 15,000 books he had stockpiled in his Oceanside home, where he ran an online business, and put them in the basement of his new store, Village Book Shoppe in Rockville Centre, where he sells new and used books.

“The business just outgrew my house, and I figured the next step to grow was maybe get a retail store and run the online stuff from the basement,” Schmidt said.

His used books — everything from Harlequin romances to histories — sell at half the retail price, and his online business allows him to have a large bargain book section upstairs, with new releases and New York Times bestsellers. “The online and retail store play off of each other,” Schmidt said. “If I have a book that’s not selling on the retail end, I’ll bring it downstairs and sell it online. If I get some cheap online book, I can bring it upstairs and offer it to retail customers at a discount.”

Schmidt’s shop replaced one called Barely Bent Books, and now his is the only bookstore left in Rockville Centre after the Odyssey Book Shop closed in January.

Meanwhile, the closest major chains are Borders in Westbury, Barnes & Noble in Carle Place and Waldenbooks in the Roosevelt Field and Green Acres malls. Schmidt said their distances work to his advantage. “A lot of the customers want to stay local,” he said. “They don’t want to drive up to the big guys at the malls.”

His closest competitor is Chapter One Books in neighboring Oceanside. Owner Arlene Toback said that while she must contend with the distant discount chain stores and Amazon.com, they are only indirect competitors. “Does it hurt you? Ultimately yes, because you’d have more traffic,” said Toback, who opened her store six years ago and sells only new books. “But do I consider that my competition? No, because people who are going to shop that way are going to shop that way. People who come in here want to get things at the moment.”

Toback said her store emphasizes customer service. She provides a one-day book-delivery service, has a reading list section for Oceanside and many neighboring school districts and parochial schools, and hires people who read and know the books her customers typically enjoy. "I want to be able to talk to my customers about the books we’re selling," said Toback. “... And getting to know your customers is a great part of it, too. It’s key.”


With established bookstores, like Booklovers Paradise in Bellmore, the allure for many customers is their old or rare volumes and their ambiance. On a recent Friday afternoon, Sarah Tamsuy of Malverne stopped in at Paradise for the first time, asked owner Amnon Tishler if he took credit cards and browsed for classic novels that are on her college reading list for next semester. She walked carefully around the shop, which overflows with 50,000 books, many of them stacked waist-high on the floor. “I kind of like this atmosphere,” Tamsuy said. “I feel like there’s more to find and you can spend all day here.”

Tishler, who opened Paradise in 1990, said his store stays afloat because it is the only one of its kind for miles around, especially now, with the demise of Odyssey Books and Lazy Days. “I own the store now — I don’t pay rent,” Tishler added. “My daughter is out of college; I don’t need tons of money to make a living anymore. But for a young person to open a retail used, rare bookstore, it’s almost impossible.”

Like Lazy Days, Tishler’s walk-in business has shrunk dramatically, since virtually all the books in his store can be found for much less online. Many customers are looking for sports books, and military and history books about World War II and the Civil War are also big sellers. Half his sales now are through abe.com.

Tishler started his online business in 1998. “I kind of saw the writing on the wall,” he said. He competes online by providing precise descriptions of his books, including the number of pages and their conditions, which outlets like Amazon.com often lack. “But there are still people who like to look and touch and smell the book before they buy,” he said.

While he is sad about the decline of the used bookstore, Tishler has resigned himself to the online world. “You have to go with the flow and the changing times,” he said.

‘He was absolutely a leader’

Lewis Harris, innovative firefighter, dies at 87

By Joseph Kellard




Lewis Harris and Stanley Hirschfield had much in common, starting with their boyhoods in the Bronx. The same age, the cousins were Boy Scouts and lifeguards together. During World War II they enlisted in the military. And they followed their fathers’ bootsteps into the New York City Fire Department.

But in his poetic eulogy to Harris, a Lido Beach resident who died at 87 after a lengthy illness on Aug. 6, Hirschfield underscored his cousin’s distinctions throughout their lives.

“Lew would study, I would play and our differences in a way brought us both together, closer every day,” Hirschfield, 87, a retired mechanic from Massapequa, read to some 500 mourners at Harris’s elaborate, firematic funeral at Congregation Beth Shalom in Long Beach last Sunday.

“He went the way of scholars, I dickered with machines, I enlisted in the Navy, he entered the Marines.”

Harris and Hirschfield joined the FDNY in the late 1940s, with a company in Harlem. He went on to a distinguished career with various companies throughout Manhattan, marked by leadership, mentoring and innovation.

“When it came to firefighting, Lew was one of the best, and it didn’t take him long to rise above the rest.”

Harris developed and patented fire equipment. Because a 2-inch hose was too powerful to hold and a 1 1/2-inch was too small, he created a 1 3/4 -inch line that enhanced speed and mobility, according to PLLFD Chief Dennis Collins, a retired FDNY firefighter. “He was just the best,” Collins said of Harris’s devotion to his work. “He was all fire department.”

Harris became the FDNY’s chief of training, communications and operations at Randall’s Island, where he built a new training center and developed and patented two types of nozzles and a pull-down alarm box system. His other contributions were the Starfire System, which computerized the fire department in the 1970s, and the introduction of the Jaws of Life to the PLLFD, which, according to Collins, may have been the first company in Nassau County to use this tool, which helps extract motorists from cars involved in serious accidents.

“When I first met him, I was a teenage lifeguard down at the beach in Lido,” Collins recalled. “And most guys who came down would take shoes to hold down their blankets. He would come down with Local Law 5, a big building code book which was about the size of three Bibles. And that was his reading for the day.”

A graduate of George Washington High School in Manhattan and NYU’s College of Engineering, Harris was a fire science instructor for 15 years at the Delahanty Institute, a now defunct civil service school, and taught fire administration at Queens College.

“He served his country well in that vast Pacific hell, and did his duty on Okinawa. For his actions and his skills, and his leadership in the hills, he was awarded the military medal Bronze Star.”

Born May 11, 1922, in the Bronx, Harris grew to 6 feet 2 and 220 pounds, and was a lifeguard at Rockaway Beach, where Hirschfield introduced him to his future wife, Soni Silver, before he enlisted in the Army in 1940. He was soon transferred to the Marine Corps, which needed engineers, and became a demolition officer and an expert in mine disposal. First Lt. Harris served in the Tinian Unit in the Northern Mariana Islands during the invasion of Okinawa. After Japan’s surrender, he and his unit went to China to help repatriate the Japanese.

When he came home, Harris returned to lifeguarding and, with Hirschfield as his best man, married Soni in 1945. The couple moved to Lido Boulevard in Lido Beach, where they raised three children, Glenn, Heidi and Stefanie, and Lewis volunteered for the PLLFD.

“As a father, as a son, as a leader, he was one who inspired every person that he met.”

Glenn Harris, a Lido Beach resident and an FDNY firefighter, remembered that his father took him on fire calls when he was a boy. “Whenever any crisis happened and I would go to fires with him, just watching how my father would lead the men and doing what they did, he was such an inspiration,” Glenn said.
His father was a tough firefighter who was otherwise quite gentle with his children and grandchildren, Glenn added.

Heidi Harris Weitz's daughter, Samara Weitz, 21, said that her grandfather’s dedication to the fire department was equaled only by his dedication to his family. “Nicole, his other granddaughter, was a gymnast who was internationally ranked and actually made it all the way to the Olympic trials but broke her ankle there,” Weitz recalled. “He was so dedicated to her and pretty much paid for her whole gymnastics career. He would drive her to practice all the time. And he would pay for my dance classes. He was a second father to both of us.”

Her grandfather, Weitz recalled, loved the beach and sailing boats from Maine to the Caribbean, and was an avid lifeguard, swimmer and runner.

Mindy Warshaw, a Long Beach resident and a close friend of the Harrises, called Lewis an icon and a giving person whose mission in life was to save lives. “He had integrity and was a man you had a lot of respect for,” Warshaw said. “He was just an awesome and amazing man.”

Warshaw said that in recent years, as his health declined, Heidi Weitz converted part of her Blackheath Road home into an apartment for her parents, where her father died.

“There are very few people you will meet in your life like Lew,” Hirschfield said. “Anything good, he did. He was a straight shooter, he was a good athlete, and anyone had a problem, they went to him. He was absolutely a leader.”

Harris is survived by his wife, 85, his son, 55, and Weitz, 53, all of Lido Beach, and seven grandchildren. The Harrises’ daughter Stefanie pre-deceased her father. He was buried at Beth Moses Cemetery in Farmingdale.

Locals React to Iranian Unrest

By Joseph Kellard


The Lido Beach woman insisted on anonymity, fearing repercussions against her or her relatives in her native Iran — whom she lost contact with when the government began blocking phone lines there.

As hundreds of thousands of Iranians have poured onto Iran’s streets to protest the controversial June 12 presidential election, clashing with the Islamic regime’s armed forces, and as images of gunned-down demonstrators have filtered from YouTube and Facebook to CNN and Fox News, the Lido woman has watched both networks almost nonstop — though from time to time she cries so hard that she must turn off her television.

“They’re killing innocent people on the street who didn’t do anything,” the woman, 55, told the Herald. “They just want their voice to be heard. It’s not a crime to want to know where their votes went.”

While protesters charge the regime with rigging the election in favor of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the woman believes that, at this point, nothing less than a revolution will matter. “I think all the people responsible for killing those people, they should be hanged,” she said of the ruling Islamic clerics. “Or they should pack their bags and leave.”

The woman and her husband left Iran for Queens in 1979, just before the Islamic revolution. They settled in Lido some five years later and are among a small number of Iranians on the barrier island. But just over the bridge, in Island Park, there are Iranians who are not only voicing their outrage online, but taking part in demonstrations overseas, along with a Long Beach attorney.

Manaz Ramani, 53, who moved to Island Park four months ago from Canada, is posting daily messages on Twitter about the election and Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old Iranian woman who was shot to death during a Tehran protest. Cell-phone video of her dying in her father’s arms have gone global.

“When a regime like this does this to their people,” Ramani said, “imagine if they have nuclear weapons what they going to do. These are just the new Hitlers.”

Ramani, who fled Iran after the regime’s first five years in power, believes the demonstrators are using the turmoil over the election as a pretext for regime change. “They are using this to show their overall anger with what has been going on all these 30 years,” Ramani explained. “The jailings, the torture, their not being able to dress or listen to music they want. Just simple rights they can’t do.”

While Ramani said she understands President Obama’s non-meddling approach to the unrest, she feels that he is not doing enough. She said his diplomatic approach with the ruling mullahs “won’t work,” and called on the U.S. government to go so far as to use armed force to help the protesters oust the regime.

“This is the best time to do it,” she said, “because now they have the support of the Iranian people. They need help, even just to have communication tools open.”

Others are calling for something different. Max Saatchi, a jewelry store owner in Island Park, has demonstrated for regime change since he was jailed and his store in Tehran was confiscated after he took part in a mass rally there in 1981. He and his wife, Amy, fled with fake passports and ultimately settled on Long Island with their sons, but still have more than 100 relatives in Iran.

Last week, Saatchi flew to Paris with Long Beach resident and attorney Frank McQuade to attend an annual conference to discuss Iran with American and European delegates and Iranian expatriates.

Coinciding with the upheaval in Iran, the event featured a 90,000-person rally in solidarity with the protesters, similar to other demonstrations staged last week in European capitals from London to Stockholm.

“In Europe they are more active and there are more people,” said Amy Saatchi, who noted that local Iranians rarely come forward to protest like her husband, who has demonstrated at many rallies outside the United Nations when Iranian officials have visited.

Max has remained in France this week, but McQuade returned home on Monday. “The agenda quickly became proactive,” he said of the conference, “as the expatriate leadership shifted to plans on how to use the crisis in Tehran to accelerate the push for democratic reform and regime change.”

The conference was sponsored by the People's Mujahadeen of Iran (PMOI), an organization that seeks European and American support of its effort to bring about change in Iran without U.S. troops or funding in order to restore a secular democracy, according to McQuade. The PMOI, he said, is waiting for the protest movement to gain strength and attempt to topple the government. “If the time is right,” McQuade said, “guns, fighters and organizers will slip into Iran to direct the popular protest towards regime change.”

The U.S. State Department, however, lists the PMOI as a terrorist group. In past interviews with the Herald, Saatchi has said that label is misleading because the PMOI’s aggression in Iran has only targeted the regime in order to replace the theocracy with a secular democracy, and that the Clinton administration had the PMOI put on the list to support and appease the "moderate" government elected in 1997.

McQuade said he participated in the conference primarily to lobby for U.S. support of the PMOI’s goals and its removal from the State Department list. And while, for now, he supports the Obama administration’s low-key reaction to the unrest in Tehran, he believes Obama ultimately doesn’t have the stomach to take on the Iranian regime. “His response to the protests, while prudent,” McQuade said, “does not come from a clever mind but from a timid heart.”

Hindu Temple Welcomes Worshipers Of All Varieties

By Joseph Kellard



Each Sunday morning, several minivans and SUVs are parked around the median outside 610 Laurelton Blvd. The unassuming two-story white house there is a Hindu temple, where sitar sounds from a Casio keyboard may be foreign to those of other faiths, but not the Hindu priest’s altruistic ethics.

“Rise to help those who are less fortunate than ourselves,” said Rory Ram, the 40-something priest who sat on the floor lotus-style at a service in March. That day, some 45 worshipers sat shoeless on white linen sheets that covered the living room-turned-sanctuary’s carpet, as the smell of curry from the kitchen permeated the house.

Later, during the standard two-hour Sunday service, a pre-teen boy who sat beside Ram echoed his message: “Service to others is service to God.”

Founded in 1989, the Maha Shiva Mandir — Temple of Great Lord Shiva — is one of only a few Hindu temples in Nassau County. Its congregants live mostly in Long Beach, but many come from throughout Long Island and as far away as the Bronx and New Jersey.

Jennifer Harricharran, an accountant and the temple’s secretary, lived and worshiped in Queens before she moved to Long Beach 19 years ago and helped found the temple. “It’s the only one for a few miles around, so it’s a little community,” she said. “In Queens they have about 30 and anyone can go to any of them. Here you basically have one place, so you have to be a family.”

Harricharran, the other founders and many worshipers are native to Guyana, South America, and they practice Sanatan Bharma, which means “an eternal way of life” and that their temple is open to all comers. “Because of the tolerance that we preach,” Ram said, “we’re able to accommodate everybody.”

As proof, he mentioned the temple-goers who come from many walks of life — lawyers, doctors, teachers, sales reps, the unemployed — and explained that some are of difference races.

Katrina Meyer of Oyster Bay first attended services at Maha Shiva Mandir last year with her boyfriend, and was made to feel very welcomed, she said. Meyer has since visited other temples in Nassau and Queens, some of them much larger. “It’s very intimate, the Long Beach gathering,” she said, “and I think it’s beautiful like that, and I really enjoy it because you really are coming together and you feel part of it.”

On Sunday, March 15, the temple emptied out early, because congregants were headed to a parade in Queens that celebrates Phagwah, the festival of colors, a holiday that ushers in spring and the Hindu New Year, and highlights the tolerance that is a central tenet of Hinduism.

“We cannot say there are certain hard and fast rules, that this is what you have to follow and do as an individual to be a part of this group,” Ram said as he prepared to leave. “It’s like many different colors: You have to appreciate each color for what it is, and you cannot say because I like red that red is the best color or higher than anyone else.”

Yet Ram indicated that courage, truth and helping others were attributes that makes followers more devout Hindus. And the temple’s elder priest, Ramnarine Tiwari, 78, suggested that Hindus face judgment days. As he described reincarnation, perhaps the religion’s most widely known belief, he said that at death, before a believer’s soul can live on in another body, the lord Shiva analyzes and assesses his actions on earth.

“Based on your merits, you may come back as a human being, the highest order of animal,” Tiwari explained. “... So you have to do your best to carry the right deeds — if you don’t, you will not be able to come back as a human being, but as a lower creature.”
Against a wall in the temple stand statuettes of several gods. Worshipers pray to them through another major god, Shiva, who represents peace and tranquility, said Ramcharran Harricharran, a co-founder of the temple. “Shiva shows you that you can control everything by controlling the mind,” he said. “If your mind is out of control, your life is out of whack.”

When regular temple-goer Ramrattie Persaud, a Long Beach resident and a phlebotomist at Nassau University Medical Center, was going through tumultuous times, she prayed to Durga Mata, the matriarchal power behind Shiva. “I was devoting more time to Durga Mata because I believe she is the destroyer of all evil,” Persaud said.

The temple’s services are filled with music. Congregants young and old play an array of instruments, from the dholak (a drum) and the dhantal (a medal rod that sounds like a triangle) to the mandolin and dish-sized gongs.

Ramcharran Harricharran chiefly plays the harmonium, an accordion-like organ, but during one service he handed it over to a young girl. Giving children the opportunity to take part is seen as a form of passing the Hindu culture from one generation to the next, said Ram, who added that music is among the most effective ways for people to understand the concepts he preaches.

“It is through participation, not through lectures, that one learns best,” he said. “The first form of devotion that a person can have is the ability to listen, and Hinduism provides this ritual of listening through music.”

When the temple was first established, the services were held in the basement of another home on Laurelton. Tiwari, a retired sugar chemist who arrived in Long Beach from Guyana 30 years ago, bought the house the worshippers now use with donations from congregants, and took out a mortgage with another founder.

“We had a handful of Indians living in Long Beach, so we thought of mobilizing ourselves together in order to offer prayers at large and to keep the community together so that they can remember where they came from,” he said.
The temple’s president, Mahadeo Persaud, said that the number of worshippers has never been higher, estimating that there are 150 in all.

“Right now,” he offered as an explanation, “people enjoy our priests.”

Meyer, who was raised a Lutheran but was also exposed to Judaism and Catholicism, said she believes that because people are taught from an early age to hold to one faith, they fear exploring other religions, but she likes to attend services of different beliefs. “When you go in there,” she said of the temple, “it feels very exotic, and it’s like you’ve entered into another country or realm.”

The Piano Is An Afterthought

Local church organists love their instrument




By Joseph Kellard


One wears worn, special dance-like shoes so he can shift his feet on the pedals more easily. The other, nearly six decades his junior, doffs his dress shoes to play in his socks. But while Dr. Denis Nicholson, 77, and Andrew Clavin, 19, prefer different footwear, they share a passion for the organ.

Nicholson has been the head organist at St. Ignatius Church, on West Broadway, since the Kennedy administration. Clavin earned the same title at St. Mary of the Isle Church across town last September. While the two men do not know each other, both said they prefer the organ to the piano, and both offered the same explanation why.

“The organ is a much more colorful instrument,” Nicholson said after playing at a recent Sunday Mass. “With all the different possible combinations of sound, you can more or less orchestrate the music.”

Calling the organ “the king of instruments,” Clavin said, “There’s just so many sounds and registrations to it.”

Nicholson plays a three-keyboard electric Rogers organ that overlooks the St. Ignatius sanctuary from its perch in the choir loft. He presses large buttons, called stops, that light up as they feed the organ’s mix of sounds, from flutes to violins to oboes. The console of his instrument bespeaks a musician at home in his element, with stacks of well-thumbed sheet music, a dusty lamp and a strategically placed mirror that he uses to get his cues from Msgr. Donald Beckmann on the altar below.

When Nicholson, a still-practicing internist in his West Penn Street home office, sets his stethoscope aside, he’s likely at St. Ignatius, whether practicing with the choir on Friday evenings, accompanying the choir at Sunday masses or preparing for the church’s seasonal concerts, such as Handel’s “Messiah” at Christmastime.

At a recent Sunday noon Mass, as always, Nicholson played his favorite Renaissance and Baroque pieces. “Those composers knew how to write for the human voice,” he said.
As worshipers filled the main aisle below, receiving Communion, he led the choir through “Prayer for Jesus.” Later, as the service ended and as congregants filed out of the church, Nicholson and the choir began “Take Up Your Cross.”

The music he plays, Nicholson said, is tied to his spirituality. He fondly quoted St. Augustine: “He said, ‘He who sings prays twice.’”


Across town at St. Mary’s, Clavin plays a two-keyboard Allen electric that stands beside the altar. In contrast to Nicholson’s clutter, Clavin’s instrument bears just a bottle of Poland Spring and a few song books he used during a recent Sunday noon service. At one point, his cell phone vibrated, and he padded off in his socks to a back room to take the call.

The cantor was absent that day, and Clavin has no choir, so he led the hymns himself, summoning his best baritone. He played “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” a hymn based on Psalm 90, and, being that it was Lent, his recessional hymn was “Lord, Who Throughout These 40 days.”

In the past four years, Clavin has played at a number of congregations in and around his native New Hyde Park and beyond. He carries a business card and isn’t shy about handing it out. Last year, through a recommendation, St. Mary’s asked him to play at a funeral. He was later invited to play at all of the church’s funerals, weddings, and weekend services.

Nicholson, too, got off to an unusually early start as an organist, playing for the first time at St. Ignatius when he was 17. He grew up in Manhattan, visited Long Beach with his family each summer and sang in the St. Ignatius choir before playing the parish’s original pipe organ at Sunday Masses.

From 1957 to 1960, Nicholson served in the U.S. Public Health Service and was stationed in Boston, but he drove to Long Beach each weekend to perform at St. Ignatius. “This is where I used to come and worship, but I also love the acoustics in this church — they’re tremendous,” he said. “I’ve sung in many other places, but the acoustics here are unreal.”

The day after he finished his medical residency at a Bronx VA hospital in 1963, Nicholson moved to Long Beach, opened a practice and has been working — and playing at St. Ignatius — ever since. Among his most memorable performances with the choir was a 9/11 ceremony a few years after the attacks, when they performed Brahams’s “Requiem.”

Clavin’s experience is measured not in years, but in the many places of worship he has played. What distinguishes St. Mary’s? “It’s a very homey parish,” he said.

His parents bought him a keyboard when he was 9, and he taught himself to play after Sunday church services. Now he’s learning piano as well, but not because he is switching allegiance. A sophomore liberal arts major at Nassau Community College, he is studying piano to help him with his music-reading skills.

And while not settled on a career just yet, he is certain where he wants to go musically. “I definitely want to see myself playing organ for the foreseeable future,” he said.

Businesses must court the Millennials

Marketing instructor stresses embracing interactive media

By Joseph Kellard


Leone Baum has problems with the way younger people are communicating, with text and instant messages, MySpace postings and Twitter updates. “I don’t think it’s helping our social situation by never looking at or touching people,” said Baum, vice president of the Hempstead Chamber of Commerce.

While some sociologists may agree with Baum, Mitch Tobol, a partner in the Amityville-based marketing firm CGT Marketing, sees that attitude toward interactive media as bad for business. “Instead of trying to push it away, embrace it,” Tobol stressed to Baum and some 70 other businessmen and women at a seminar on March 12, titled “Successful Marketing in Challenging Times,” at Hofstra.

Tobol’s oft-repeated theme is that there are always business opportunities, regardless of the economic conditions, and one of the places to find them is the rapidly expanding world of blogs, iPhones and Google alerts.

“It’s not just about the economy,” he said. “If you want to market successfully, you need to understand the environment you’re in.”

While Tobol’s PowerPoint presentation touched on everything from branding to pricing to purchasing patterns, he tied it all to what has become the marketing world’s major focus: the Internet and youth. As the relevance of the baby boom generation and traditional marketing methods — particularly advertising — wanes, interactive technology, and the new generation of “millennials,” are on the rise. By 2015, this generation, generally acknowledge to have begun in 1977, will become the U.S.’s largest demographic segment.

This has already caused seismic shifts in marketing, with tech-savvy consumers who can instantly find competitive services and products, Tobol explained. “The marketing message is now in the hands of the consumers,” he said. “They are all-powerful.

Technology allows them to send and receive messages in seconds, and they tell everybody — everybody — what they are thinking. This is a totally new dynamic in marketing. If you are not aware of it, you need to be.”

Today, consumers can register their evaluations of businesses and their products and services on Epinions.com, which offers “unbiased reviews by real people,” and similar Web sites. “When someone writes something bad about your business, engage that person,” Tobol said, noting that complaints are a window into a company’s weaknesses.

He talked about how CEOs of major companies, including General Motors, keep daily blogs, making it possible for consumers to write to them — access those consumers have never had.

Tobol stressed that in the age of the Internet, it is critical for businesses not only to have a Web site, but make it distinct from those of their competitors. “It’s where more and more people, every single day, will experience your firm for the very first time,” he said.

Gary Curley, a plumber from Suffolk County who attended the seminar, said he is “old school” when it comes to his Web site. “He mentioned constantly updating your site and being interactive with it,” Curley said. “That kind of put the light on me a little bit there.”

After listening to Tobol, Curley said, he understood that he needed to make better use of social and business networking sites to promote himself as an extension of his company. “He really opened my eyes to the fact that using them could be a good marketing strategy,” he said.

Tobol described Facebook, MySpace and other networking sites as the “new frontier” in marketing. He cautioned that while some people successfully use Facebook for business, the site focuses primarily on social networking. “If you go full force in business on it,” he said, “a lot of people are bound to turn you off.”

Many merchants fail to take advantage of the business-to-business sites LinkedIn and Plaxo, Tobol said. Another attendee, Carine Ulano-Firestone, who sells jewelry, gifts and accessories online from her Bellmore home, said she was in the dark about these sites until she attended Tobol’s marketing courses at Hofstra’s Entrepreneurial Assistance Program.

Another member of the audience, Pat Savella, who owns a decorating business, said she plans to take Tobol’s advice to nurture existing clients — the people most likely to do business, who he termed “low-hanging fruit” — because they are the best return on any company’s marketing dollar. “I’m going to try go back to those customers instead of trying to deal with the ones who are always trying to lowball everything,” Savella said. “I’ve learned to appreciate the clients I have and work with them more.”

Baum, who regularly attends business-related seminars and relays what she learns to the Hempstead Chamber, said that Tobol had impressed on her the importance of business Web sites and interlinking them. “A lot of our businesses in our chamber already do have Web sites,” she said, “but some are terrible, and I do think that they should be linking their sites with our Chamber and other Chambers.”

Home Sweet First Home

Rookie buyers crowd Long Beach housing market

By Joseph Kellard


In January, Ray Sackman closed on his first home, a one-bedroom, one-bath condo on West Broadway. The 28-year-old mortgage trader — who has an apartment in Rego Park and splits time between the two —is part of a nationwide trend that has not escaped Long Beach.

That is, a growing number of home buyers are first-timers, many of them 20- and 30-somethings capitalizing on lower prices and interest rates in the wake of the mortgage and banking crisis. According to the National Association of Realtors, 41 percent of buyers in 2008 were first-timers, up from 36 percent in 2006.

Although local real estate agents have no precise data on this trend in the city, some of them said that over the past six to nine months, first-timers have mostly snatched up condos or co-ops at prices ranging between $250,000 and $400,000 with interest rates at around 5 percent, down from the pre-crisis 6 to 6 1/4 percent rates.

“People who have something to sell must wait until they’ve freed up their cash before they do something,” said Miriam Gold, owner of Paul Gold Real Estate. “So the first-time home buyer is really in a good position.”

Sackman said that in addition to the favorable market, he wanted to buy in the community where he has been surfing for many years. “I just decided that it was time to get a place of my own and that I also get a place where I can escape,” he said. He looked at many homes on the Internet before contacting a broker, and viewed six condos in Long Beach before deciding on his new home. He took out a loan on the $340,000, 700-square-foot unit and put down 40 percent.

Joyce Coletti, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman, said that most new buyers are taking out loans, but banks now want to see anywhere from 20 to 40 percent down, when a few years ago the average was 10 percent or less — even zero. Coletti said that business has picked up considerably with the federal stimulus package offering home buyers an $8,000 credit.

Gold said that new buyers are moving in all around town, and Coletti said that at the Windward condos on West Broadway, where Sackman lives, 14 out of the 28 units have been sold to first-time owners at prices ranging from $199,000 to $399,000. Teachers, firefighters and police officers, she said, are buying one-bedroom, studio and Junior 4 units, the last having a separate dining area that can be converted into a second bedroom.

One New York City police officer, Lou Casto, said he didn’t need a loan, and put 23 percent down on a $220,000 oceanfront studio with a terrace at 250 Shore Road. Single, living in Bayridge and prepared to close on his new unit by next week, Casto, 39, had already rented two other places in Long Beach. After much research, he decided to buy in the city, and took the first place Coletti showed him.

“I like the beach, I like that it has the railroad with direct access to the city, and I like the gyms and movie theater,” Casto said of Long Beach. “It’s like a Bayridge on the ocean.”

Coletti noted that a comparable unit in Casto’s building sold for $260,500 in April 2006. She said the market began to fall in Long Beach around September 2007, and since then prices are down on condos and co-ops by 15 percent, and on houses by 20 percent.

According to sales data collected by the New York State Association of Realtors, the median sales price of single-family homes in Nassau County in the fourth quarter of 2006 was $480,000, and for the same quarter of 2008 it was $425,000, an 11.5 percent drop.

Josephine Lobel owns a home in Island Park that her husband, Adam, rebuilt when they bought it three years ago, but they recently bought their first home on the barrier island. The couple moved quickly to buy another fixer-upper, a split ranch with four bedrooms and two baths on Regent Drive in Lido Beach, and is still trying to sell their Island Park home. They paid $460,000, putting 20 percent down on their new home, which, Coletti said, would have sold for $500,000 just a couple of years ago.

“This house really was a no-brainer for us,” said Josephine. “It’s a big corner lot at a really good price for Lido Beach. We jumped on it because whatever condition a house is in, my husband can fix it up.”

Josephine, who grew up in the close quarters of Long Beach’s West End but wanted to raise her family in a home with more property, said she looked at many homes on the Internet before visiting about five.

Gold and Coletti said that in the recent past they would only have to show three to six homes to prospective buyers, but these days they show as many as 15 to 25 before customers make decisions. “People are being cautious and just being certain about what they want,” said Gold, adding that she has seen two buyers’ markets in her 45 years in Long Beach real estate. “A lot of people don’t know exactly if they want a home, a condo or a co-op, so it’s been a little bit of an educational process.”

Coletti, who is recognized for selling the most homes on the barrier island each year for the past decade, said today’s buyers are showing considerably more discretion, especially when it comes to price. “In 2006, if you showed them a nice apartment, they bit on it right then and there,” she said “Now they want to see 15 other one-bedrooms before they make up their mind because they need the lowest price possible.”

Coletti noted that what’s also new is that some potential buyers are bidding on two or three units at a time. “It doesn’t matter if they like a place a lot or not,” she said. “They’re all looking for the best deal first.”