mchen@heraldsun.com; 419-6636
DURHAM — Lunch time at Joe’s Diner attracts all kinds of Bull City residents.
Firefighters from a nearby station came in through the back entrance around 11 a.m. one day. Nearby, police officers seated themselves at a table to chow down on hot dogs. Workers lined the counter to eat burgers and read a newspaper. And community organizer John Schelp stopped in with a friend to tell stories of the building, which used to house Crabtree Pharmacy.
Joe Bushfan, the tall, brawny owner of the restaurant at 2100 Angier Ave., plays host to customers from a wide cross-section of Durham.
“Look at how diverse this is,” Bushfan said, sweeping a large hand across the restaurant.
After years of operating a hot dog cart at the same corner, the intersection of Angier Avenue and Driver Street, Bushfan has renovated three buildings into Joe’s Diner, an adjoining Internet café and space for TROSA’s grocery store, set to open by late February.
The businesses are expected to help enliven the long economically stagnant East Durham area, and Bushfan has more planned. He is hoping to eventually purchase and renovate 10 more storefronts across the intersection, in the northwest corner of Angier and Driver.
“I know what it’s like not to have,” he said. “My highest goal in life is to help people.”
Bushfan grew up in a rough section of Boston next door to R&B star Bobby Brown. It was through Brown that Bushfan got his lucky break to work security detail for his group, New Edition.
Over the years, Bushfan built up his reputation as he traveled the world as a bodyguard for celebrities like Brown, Alicia Keys, Clay Aiken and Yao Ming. Along the way, he found that he liked a good hot dog. At Joe’s Diner, customers can prove their love of hot dogs with the gut-busting one-pound dog, with jumbo dogs set on a bed of pastrami.
To Bushfan, setting up a business at that intersection was a no-brainer. It’s not far from the Durham Freeway and major thoroughfares Alston Avenue and Miami Boulevard, and he found there was enough foot traffic for his hot dog cart to earn more than $3,000 a week.
People thought he was nuts to open a business in East Durham, but Bushfan was nonplussed.
The gang problem was nothing like what he’s seen elsewhere. The bodyguard could take care of himself in a scuffle, and anyone who harmed him would’ve had to face his wife, District Court Judge Elaine Bushfan.
Instead, Bushfan said he’s met plenty of people, many of them kids and teenagers, who needed help.
There was the man who walked up to him without any shoes on, and the kids who didn’t have anywhere to go after school. And there was one day, Bushfan said with still a touch of disbelief, when he offered a free hot dog to anyone with a driver’s license.
Not one person took him up on his offer.
“Nobody around here has driver’s licenses,” he said. “I’d take them to Walmart and they’d be looking around, picking up six-packs of sodas and be like, ‘Wow.’ They’ve never even been outside this neighborhood.”
The area through the 1960s was a lower-middle income neighborhood populated by those who worked at Liggett, American Tobacco and in the cotton mills of Golden Belt, according to former City Councilman Dan Hill, who was also Bushfan’s mentor in starting the business.
But as those factories shut down, economic decline in the neighborhood began. Nowadays, the intersection of Angier Avenue and Driver Street is home to lines of vacant storefronts.
In this way, Bushfan said, he believes a business can do as much as or more than a church or nonprofit to give life back to the community.
“There are so many nonprofits, but they’re not bringing any economic value. They’re not creating any jobs,” he said. “This area is so centrally located. It’s like Vegas. If you build it, they will come.”
Hill, Bushfan’s mentor, said he hopes the corner will be a gathering place for the community and inspire other businesses to take a closer look at the area. Hill had put up the money to buy the property and provided Bushfan $200,000 in loans to help him start the business. Bushfan also received $200,000 in a Neighborhood Commercial Revitalization grant to get the business going.
“What hopefully this could bring to the community is the revitalization of a business district that will provide a gathering place and a grocery store that people could actually get to,” Hill said.
Wendy Noel, director of the Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers (TROSA) grocery store, said it will be the only store within the mile radius that offers produce, meat selections and a wide selection of grocery items.
She’s heard many positive reactions from residents in the community, but said there is still skepticism.
“I think a lot of people have said they’re going to do things in the area and bring good things, but don’t necessarily follow through,” she said.
Bushfan has spent the past two years and three months renovating the space and working to open his restaurant. Inside the restaurant, people pat him on the back and come up for hugs.
“I thought I was going to open up a business. I didn’t know I was going to open up a ministry,” he said.
