I am guessing I have been going to the Apollo restaurant since the 60’s when the owners father first opened the place. Since the father passed away the son and his wife have been running the restaurant. Each year that passes probably puts them closer to retirement. During their working lives they have worked seven days a week incredibly long hours and very hard. They have always employed a large number of low income workers that are despirately glad to get the tiny wage and tips. Hundreds and hundreds have worked there many of which have been struggling University students and endless numbers of starving poor people. There has almost always been a number of physically and mentally challenged people who have been thrilled to work there. What everyone gets is good treatment by friendly honest people. The restaurant is an new Canadian immigrant success story. People who work hard and raise and educate their children and pay their taxes. What I have seen for a very long time is media and City Hall politicians and local millionaires take shots at them on the assumption that these people can easily spend some money the way other people would like them to. Every month that this business successfully makes it’s payroll , pays its taxes and bills must be a big accomplishment for this business. I am not friends of these people but I am an impressed customer. I have seen decades of downtown drunks urinating in their doorway breaking their windows. The city should be very glad these people have chosen to employ countless hundreds of people down through the years and may keep doing it well into their senior years. They keep getting knocked down and getting up to work hard another day. Someday time will pass and the building will pass onto somebody else and somebody will probably spend a fortune restoring the building thereby thrilling high income developers and historians and university educated people. The business will no longer employ or sell affordable food to poor people and the lights in the building will be off more than they are on. There will probably be a long string of failures and new owners will lament the fact that they can’t turn it into another vomit urine bar downtown. Someday people will recognize this business that existed for 30 or 40 years was a real downtown asset. Nobody has worked harder than these people. AC