Veselka

The story

The building at 144 Second Avenue once hosted a robbery so notorious it sent three teenagers to their executions — the 1937 case of 'the East Side Boys.' Seventeen years later, Ukrainian refugees Wolodymyr and Olha Darmochwal purchased what was then a candy shop and newsstand on that same corner, partly to help Plast, a Ukrainian scouting organization, secure its headquarters. That modest act of community loyalty became Veselka, now one of the last Slavic restaurants surviving in a neighborhood that once overflowed with them.