Open Window Bakery Closes
Posted January 20, 2011 7:32 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The recession and rising food prices have shuttered one of the city’s oldest family-run businesses – Open Window Bakery.
One hundred and fifty employees are out of work and the owners, heartbroken now that Max Feig’s legacy has come to an end.
“My father: a very kind, very generous, very giving, very caring and a truly, truly wonderful human being,” said Open Window CEO, Gail Agasi.
“This is my father’s baby basically, and I would have liked to have had it go on for generations.”
Feig suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and doesn’t even know the business he founded closed on Monday.
With seven dollars in his pocket and a wife and two kids, Feig came to Canada from Czechoslovakia in 1953 a Holocaust survivor.
When he opened his first store four years later, Feig and his partners designed it so customers could watch the bakers at work – hence the name Open Window. It was a business that would do much more than sell bread.
“Over the years I became asthmatic because I was allergic to flour,” said Tony Occhiuto, one of the company’s first employees. “I was so sick that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore. So Max said, ‘No, you’re not gonna go anywhere.’ And not even six months later, he offered me a job to be on the road in sales.”
The company’s only hope now is that an investor will step in with the money needed to resume operating.
