Keep Those NYC & Company Vultures Away From This One

Now here’s a story to tell the folks back home in Ohio (or London* or Ireland** or Moscow***, as the case may be):

The dining room at De Marco’s Pizzeria and Restaurant on Houston Street was empty Sunday evening, save for one couple sharing a pizza and a table by the window.

They were tourists, they said, and unknowingly were among the first customers to visit the restaurant less than two weeks after a worker there was shot 15 times in the back, and two auxiliary police officers were gunned down while chasing his shooter through the streets of Greenwich Village.

But seriously — why back down from the notoriety? Everyone knows that people love to gawk:

Being the scene of violent crime has sometimes boosted business at city restaurants, according to crime historians and restaurateurs, while in other cases establishments have seen their reputations irrevocably damaged.

“In a strange sense, the notoriety can actually help,” a New York restaurateur, Drew Nieporent, said. “People will likely come to De Marco’s as voyeurs. . . . It might even gain a national reputation.”

Restaurants sometimes undergo cosmetic changes following a traumatic incident, a professor of security management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Robert McCrie, said. “Fast food places where shootings have taken place often shut for a day, or undergo a name change,” Mr. McCrie said. He described these venues as “forbidden kinds of places” whose notoriety attracts customers.

“There’s a certain cachet associated with going to a restaurant where something bad has happened,” a sociologist at Indiana University, Thomas Gieryn, said. “We have a morbid fascination with places where impossible things happen.”

Some restaurants capitalize on the drama that transpired within their walls, Mr. Gieryn said. Sparks Steak House became a Midtown landmark after a mob boss, Paul Castellano, was murdered there in 1985.

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