This Manayunk pizza shop is coming back four months after Hurricane Ida

Guido Abbate recently flattened his hand and held it about six inches above his pizza oven and six feet above the floor. This, he said, was how high floodwaters rose the morning of Sept. 2, when the swollen Schuylkill, stoked by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, invaded his Manayunk pizzeria.

Much of the water would drain by late afternoon, leaving peanut-buttery mud on his countertops and a lot of ruined food in his walk-in refrigerator, which had just been stocked for a busy weekend. A pump that Abbate had scrambled to find belched water out of the basement.

A day later, he’d post a video of the flooded patio at Pizzeria L’Angolo on its Facebook and Instagram pages, along with a note: We Hope To Be Back In The Near Future!

It took four months and about $30,000 of his own money, but Pizzeria L’Angolo is back.

When asked about the business he lost while closed, Abbate quickly replied, “You can’t think about it. If you think about it, you go crazy. You’ve got to move on.”

The remnants of Hurricane Ida, termed one of the most disruptive storms in the region’s history, spawned seven tornadoes and caused massive flooding. Five people were killed and hundreds of people displaced from homes.

Tornado winds in South Jersey peeled off roofs and carried debris thousands of feet. In Philadelphia, the underground portion of the Vine Street Expressway filled nearly to its overpasses. A water plant was knocked offline for nine days, affecting service to about a million people in Delaware, Chester and Montgomery Counties. The storm caused more than $100 million in public infrastructure damage.

In Manayunk, the corner of Main Street and Shurs Lane — the location of Abbate’s restaurant — became a hot spot for TV news crews after the Schuylkill, brown and furious, leaped its banks about 200 feet away. It swept through the open end of Shurs Lane and swamped the corner with water and debris. Like the Vine Street Expressway, Main Street looked like a Venetian canal for several blocks to the south.

Pizzeria L’Angolo, its name painted in red on the stuccoed side of the restaurant, drew local and national attention from the flood coverage — which Abbate said would have been great for business had his place reopened immediately. But there would be a long way to go.

» READ MORE: Climate change is straining Philly’s 19th-century sewage system. Ida was a ‘wake-up call.’

Dan Neducsin, the longtime developer who owns the three-story building where the pizzeria occupies the ground floor, said the flooding after Ida “was the worst ever. We had water where we’ve never had water.”

The flood caused “a couple hundred thousand dollars” of damage to that building alone, which was covered by insurance, Neducsin said. So Abbate did not have to pay to replace a heater, moldy drywall, insulation and an electrical system. The restroom was a total loss.

“The mud was disgusting,” Neducsin said.

Like many of Nedusin’s 20 or so other business tenants, Abbate did not have flood insurance for the pizzeria’s contents, so he had to replace items such as the stools at the picture window and motors for the refrigerator and freezer. Plus food.

Abbate, who owns restaurants in Jenkintown and Southampton and a still-closed craft-brew pub on Main Street whose basement also flooded, already had delayed his planned March 2020 opening of Pizzeria L’Angolo for two months because of the pandemic.

“And when I opened, it was still the pandemic, and no one was on the street,” said Abbate, who, like other merchants, also had a hard time hiring a staff of five or six employees.

But the pizzeria — which, besides round and square pizza, serves “rustic Italian” entrées, salads and sides, plus sandwiches, stromboli and calzone — slowly built a base of regular customers through last August, just before the remains of Hurricane Ida passed through.

“The week before it happened,” he said, “it was one of the best weeks we’ve had.”

Abbate, who lives in Huntingdon Valley and is married with two sons and a daughter, had wanted his own restaurant in Manayunk since he worked at his uncle’s restaurant, the now-closed Bella Trattoria, more than 25 years ago. So he knew a flood was possible.

Abbate said he had even pursued buying business contents insurance in case of a flood, without much success: “If you have flooding, they won’t give it to you,” he said. “What are you supposed to do? I don’t understand.” He said he would keep trying.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency directed people affected by Ida to floodsmart.gov, which offers ways to mitigate flood risk and reduce insurance costs. FEMA also recently updated the way it rates insurance policies through a new system called Risk Rating 2.0, which may make them more affordable, spokesperson Charlie Elison said. The Pennsylvania Insurance Department offers information, as well.

Brian McCollum, who owns an insurance company just up the hill from the pizzeria, said flood insurance obviously costs more in a susceptible area such as Manayunk.

In his 20 years on Main Street, McCollum said, “I’ve seen flooding here before, but nothing like this.”

» READ MORE: Hurricane Ida destroyed affordable rental units. Hundreds of families still can’t find new ones.

His business closed temporarily after the storm but sustained no damage. Employees were able to work from an office in Newtown Square.

Flood insurance is not always required, McCollum said, and some renters think, “It’s only gotten so high this one time, and I don’t think it’s going to happen again, or nothing this bad.

“I’d be more on the side where we’ve just seen it happen — and could it happen again?”

September’s flood spread such debris as car parts, wires, vegetation — and many big, dead fish.

“At first, I was wondering if somebody’s koi or carp pond had overflowed,” said Christopher Plant, who owns Kismet Cowork, a multi-use space, a block northwest on Main. “It definitely felt like there was hazardous waste everywhere.”

Plant and his 19-year-old son, Morgan, hustled to his business at 6 a.m. the day after the storm to move and stack as much furniture as possible. Kismet is in a building with no basement, so as a result, his business was closed for only 10 days. Yet Kismet sustained $30,000 worth of content damage, with Plant needing to replace a dishwasher and a large refrigerator.

“There’s very little to do in reality to prevent water from getting into a space when it wants to,” Plant said.

As the water rose, Abbate sealed shut the front doors of his pizzeria, keeping the water out, at first. Before he opened the pizzeria in 2020, he had a long wooden plank installed in front of the picture window so customers could enjoy a slice standing outdoors. That turned out to be smart, because a tire or car part floating by could have shattered the window.

Finally, at 4:30 a.m., Abbate went home, figuring he could do little else. The water continued to rise, getting into the space that it wanted: the basement.

Abbate did not use the basement for his business, but he knew he had to get rid of the water there before he could do anything else. So he went to several home-improvement stores, looking for a water pump before he found one in Warminster.

That would be step one. Adjacent to the pizzeria is a lighted patio with picnic tables for the use of his customers. As the brown water dropped to the level of the white table tops, the tables looked to him like lily pads in a pond. “Looked kind of cool,” he said, smiling.

Today, you’d never know the place had been flooded out just four months ago. A fire panel still needs to be replaced. But the oven, the heart of the operation, only needed servicing because it does not run on electricity. There is a dark line on the back door, marking the water’s apex.

Guido Abbate returned on Jan. 4 to making pizzas, some named after his wife and kids. People are starting to wander back in.

He thought he’d be able to reopen in December, but new parts for the motor to his freezer were defective. But he is happy to finally be back, just as he said he hoped he would, four long months ago.

Asked whether he had any fear about his pizzeria being flooded again, Abbate had a one-word response: “No.”