People from around the corner never walked to Fifth Avenue - it was only a hundred feet away!” You’d look down Fifth Avenue left and right, and you wouldn’t see nobody out there. “Well, back then, it was cowboys and Indians,” Philip said. He opened R&A Discount Stores, then one of the few businesses along a mostly deserted Fifth Avenue. After eight years at the airline, he decided to strike out on his own. Albert landed a customer service job at Pan Am. The family of six moved into a small apartment - the first of a few places they would call home before eventually settling in Bay Ridge - on Sixth Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues. And he said, ‘Nope, I want to go to New York.’” In 1958, the Cabbads arrived in Park Slope.
“And then in Michigan, he worked for an uncle of ours at a Chevy and Buick dealership. So we stayed in Michigan for six months or so because my father had to come after with the visas,” he explained. “We went to Michigan because that’s where my mother’s from. He still uses the old discount store across the street for storage.Īt 61, Philip is thin and short, with graying hair and an accent inflected with tones of Argentina and Brooklyn. Now, Philip runs the place with a different Albert: his own son. Since 1976, Phillip has owned R&A Cycles - the self-proclaimed “world’s largest cycle store.” Until his father’s passing, Phillip and Albert owned the store together. “And then my father said, ‘Nope, I want to go to America! That’s it,’” Philip Cabbad, Albert’s oldest son, told me, offering his best imitation of his father’s boldness. Two more children, Debra and David, were born in Albert’s homeland. In 1955, Albert decided to move the family back to Syria. They married and had two sons, Philip and Michael. It was in Argentina that he met Ramona, an American woman from Michigan. In his early twenties, he moved to Tucumán, Argentina, where he lived with the family of his uncle and learned to speak Spanish fluently. Across the way lies what remains of R&A Discount Stores - Albert’s first business, opened in 1966.Īlbert Cabbad was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1926. Next door is R&A Cycles, run by Cabbad’s son Philip, a store a bit more updated than its hardware counterpart, with flashy bikes and accessories, perfect for a neighborhood filled with green bike lanes.
This is R&A Hardware, one outpost of a retail empire Albert Cabbad - businessman, activist, and neighborhood fixture - built on this street in six decades of life in Brooklyn. Or perhaps that’s just the cigar smoke streaming in from the back. A soft, comforting mustiness hangs in the air.
Inside, power lines and tools hung overhead and dust collects on stacks of plywood. Customers are greeted by a simple light beige awning, and a window plastered with decaying decals. Here, along Park Slope’s bustling commercial thoroughfare, is a shop that is unusually plain - it doesn’t scream out “Look at me” with typeface or tapestry. It’s not a boutique or new restaurant, not a café with coffee drinkers and MacBooks row by row. There’s a shop on the corner of Park Place and Fifth Avenue that catches your eye when you walk past.
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