99-cent Fresh Pizza

There's a 99-cent pizza place on 9th Avenue behind the Port Authority bus terminal. It's next to Stiles Farmers Market, next to the now-shuttered Big Apple Meat Market. Actually, it's less of a pizza "place" and more of a pizza stand.

I wonder what will happen to it once Big Apple's building is demolished and the block goes luxury.



It's an orderly but somewhat makeshift little pizza stand, covered with red-lettered signs that seem to shout. It scored an A from the Health Department. And it always draws customers. It opened during the 99-cent recession pizza boom a few years back, and its manager claims to be first on the scene.

I especially like it at night, when it takes on a foggy, dirty-fishtank glow. It feels like something from the older New York.



In 2010, the Times described its scene:

"13 men and women stood on the sidewalk outside 99¢ Fresh, impatiently ordering and impatiently eating slices amid the ambiance of ungentrified Hell’s Kitchen: idling delivery trucks near the rear of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a barking dog named Leo someone tied up down the block, a prostitute who hurried by saying something about $150 for a half-hour and a bearded homeless man with a cane who spoke loudly to himself about the size of the average bear. He ate two slices."



99-cent Fresh Pizza also sells a few lonely doughnuts, warmed by a fluorescent bulb, bathed in mercury vapor.






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