By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
LOWER EAST SIDE — Restaurant-goers visiting the NoLIta hot spot La Esquina may not realize it, but their late-night taco orders will help benefit dozens of Chinatown residents left homeless by a fire that tore through their Grand Street buildings last month.
La Esquina — the popular taqueria that was briefly shuttered by the city this week — is part of a group of Lower East Side businesses that have banded together to raise money for the victims of the April 11 fire, which left one man dead and up to 200 displaced.
Over the next week and a half, a handful of popular local restaurants will donate profits from their sales to the tenants affected by the fire.
The Hester Street Fair will also be accepting new and gently used items that will be sold at the weekend market to help raise funds for the tenants, some of whom are currently fighting to stay in one building that was badly damaged by the fire.
The other participating restaurants are An Choi, Barrio Chino, Café El Portal and Lovely Day, with each donating a portion of their profits made from May 17-21.
The open-air street fair, at the corner of Hester and Essex Streets, will accept items from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. this Sunday, May 16, and then sell them the following Sunday, May 23, during the same hours.
MTV personality SuChin Pak, who founded the fair and lives only blocks from the fire site, said her involvement stems from trying to bridge the gap between the sometimes-disparate communities coexisting on the Lower East Side.
“We all live around Chinatown, and sometimes it’s very difficult to engage that community,” she said. “But they’re our neighbors.”
One of Pak’s good friends, who also works in television and does event organizing, reached out to acquaintances at each of the restaurants to get them on board.
“It’s a testament to the downtown community,” Pak said. “We’re all hipsters and these restaurants are fancy and I can’t get in them half the time, [but] we’ve all kind of grown up in the downtown area, and now we have the ability to do things like this.”
