02/21/2025
To Our Terzo Customers, Friends and Neighbors:
As many of you surely know, a water main on 50th burst in the early hours of February 13th a hundred thousand gallons of water flooded the basement of our building. So much water passed through our building in the span of a few hours that at one point the basement was flooded to the ceiling.
Over the last week, we have been entirely focused on the immediate issues resulting from this destruction but now that we have a moment to catch our breath, we want to update the community on where things stand.
First, though, we want to thank you for the outpouring of support and love we’ve received over the last week. We cannot tell you how much it has meant to us and the Terzo team. We apologize that we haven’t been able to personally acknowledge all of these gestures, but they truly have helped keep us going. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
The pictures of this event are awful but in truth they don’t begin to capture the extent of the damage. Every object in our basement and most items on our main floor were touched by this event and have to be removed and discarded: equipment and materials, of course, but also some tables, chairs, fixtures. walls and floors. All of it will have to be removed and replaced. The building was also extensively damaged at a structural level, so much so that the city has declared an intent to condemn and it is currently uninhabitable.
This doesn’t just affect us, of course. Our fellow commercial tenants - Sparrow Café, The Paperback Exchange, and Theisen Renovation - have been similarly impacted and the second-floor residential tenants have had to leave their homes. Please keep them in your thoughts as well as the neighbors who also experienced significant water damage.
Our staff has been amazing - as always - in responding to this event; many of them came to the restaurant within hours of the event to help in any way possible. We’re making sure their wages are covered in the immediate aftermath and believe our insurer will provide longer-term compensation for at least some of their lost income. We’re also looking at ways to offer them positions at the other restaurants, but all of this still may not be enough to cover everyone’s immediate needs. For that reason, a GoFundMe page has been created to support the staff. You can find it here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/terzo-employee-relief-fund
At this point, we can’t say what this means for Terzo except to say that we’re looking at every option for clean-up and recovery and assessing if, when and how we might be able to re-open. We will be working closely with our landlord, our insurer, contractors and the city to understand the full extent of the damage and what is needed to move forward. Some of that work might take a while to complete but the answers will guide our decisions.
For almost 12 years, Terzo has been a part of this community; it has been a joy to serve you and to get to know our neighbors. We are grateful for every guest who has walked through our doors, for every employee who has become part of our extended family and for the overwhelming support we have received over the years.
We will share news as we learn it and do our best to make our critical decisions as quickly as possible. Knowing that this will inevitably take longer than any of us would like, we thank you in advance for your patience and understanding.
Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
The Broder Family
