Stepping into Original Products Botanica on the corner of East 189th Street and Webster Avenue, visitors are welcomed with the aroma of fresh herbs, smiling employees and Spanish-Caribbean music playing from overhead speakers. It’s an expansive 15,000-square-foot store housing a vast collection of items — from altar tools and supplies, to ritual and saint candles, tarot cards and everything else in between.

Original Products Botanica’s services to its customers go back a generation, to the early 1930s and Spanish Harlem, when waves of Caribbean citizens began to immigrate to the United States.

“At that time, there weren’t any companies that understood the demand for these types of products, and it created a niche for us,” said second generation co-owner, Jason Mizrahi. “It all began with my uncle and dad.”

Albert Amateau opened his store, M&A Amateau, on East 115th Street, between Park and Madison avenues, in an area that would be later established as La Marketa, an important social and economic venue for Hispanic New York at that time.

Armed with an unassuming smile and a Judeo-Spanish language known as “Oriental” Ladino, a 14th- and 15th-century Spanish dialect spoken in Turkey and Rhodes, Amateau was able to seamlessly blend into his surroundings and tap into a severely underserved market. With the help of his cousin, Jack Mizrahi, the company mushroomed into one of the largest religious and occult practice product wholesalers in the area. After a quarter century of profitability, Jack decided to branch out into another underserved marketplace — the Bronx.

Jack Mizrahi, known as “Jacko” to his customers and vendors, opened his first retail store in 1959 on Bathgate Avenue. He remained there until 1975, when he had the opportunity to move into the site of a former A & P supermarket; a cavernous space just off Fordham Road.

In 1998, Jacko’s son, Jason Mizrahi, who grew up on 171st Street and the Grand Concourse and was a recent graduate of the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond, assumed the reins of the company and began implementing his vision of becoming the premier distributor of top quality spiritual, religious and mystical supplies.

His first successful step came in 2002, when Jason decided to merge his mainly retail operation with the mainly wholesale operation of his cousin, Steve Amateau (Albert’s son who took over in 1983), to create a veritable mega-store; the first and only of its size on Fordham Road.

“Due to our size, we are able to offer a much larger variety of products. It’s one-stop shopping that a smaller retailer can’t keep up with,” said Jason.

Steve added, “I had a small wholesale operation and Jason had a small retail operation, so we decided to merge, and the rest is profitable history.”

“Another big part of our success is our employees,” Jason said. “We have a great staff that has been with us for a long time, between 10 to 15 years. It’s a close knit group who care for each other, and our customers.”

Despite their success, Jason has concerns. “I want to expand, which would require capital investment for equipment and employees that would create more jobs, but I couldn’t get the financing,” he said. “When you have been successful for the past 50 years, and have a product that a guy in a suit can’t understand, it makes borrowing extremely difficult. It’s just ‘no!’”

“It’s getting harder and harder for the guy who’s just starting out, and I’m sad about the general direction in which things are working in this country,” he added.

Jason credits the Fordham Road Business Improvement District (BID), of which he is a member, with getting more businesses involved in the neighborhood and giving the area a different feel. “It’s the big-box feel without all the puff and fluff.”

Jason doesn’t follow any of the faiths his store provides for, but said, “The power of faith, and the spiritual religion resides in each person’s daily life. If you go to church every Sunday or to Synagogue, or you don’t, it’s what it means to you.”

Ed. note: Original Products Botanica is located at 2486-88 Webster Ave. (on the corner of 189th Street and Webster Avenue). Store hours are Monday through Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5:40 p.m. Visit www.originalbotanica.com for more information. A version of this story appears in the Feb. 23-March 7 edition of the Norwood News.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.