We didn’t come to Queens.
We are Queens.
Terp Bros isn’t a launch deck. It’s a block we already lived on. Six chapters about how a Queens corner became a Queens counter — and stayed Queens after the lights went on.
Before the door.
1991 · Cross Bay Blvd, Ozone Park
A block before it was a brand. The A train rumbled overhead at Aqueduct. The bakery on 101st Ave opened at five. The pizza shop on Cross Bay still pulled a pie at three in the afternoon. This was the neighborhood a kid named Al ran around in — two blocks off Cross Bay, and never far from it since.
Long before legal cannabis, before retail licenses, before anyone said the word “dispensary” in a city zoning meeting — this corner existed exactly like this. The pizza shop on Cross Bay still pulls a pie at three. The bakery still sells fresh bread at four. The story didn’t start with a license. It started with a sidewalk in Ozone Park.
The bodega gene.
Born local, stays local
A bodega knows your name. A chain knows your card number. We wanted to build the first one, not the second.
The two co-founders never agreed to open a dispensary. They agreed to open a counter — the place you walk into knowing you’ll be talked to like a person. The dispensary part was paperwork.
That meant the same shelf the founders shop from. Same lab-tested OCM-compliant flower. Same questions answered the same way whether you spent eighty dollars or twelve.
It meant the same hello at the door. The same wave at the cafe across the street. The same regulars on Tuesday morning who buy the same eighth every Tuesday morning.
We didn’t want to scale culture. We wanted to scale the part of culture that doesn’t scale.
CAURD #20.
New York’s Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program was built to put justice-impacted New Yorkers at the front of the legal line — not the back. Jeremy Rivera was that line. Number twenty.
The license wasn’t a finish line. It was a door. The next chapter was making sure the door stayed open for the next people coming through.
Ditmars opens.
36-10 Ditmars Blvd · Astoria
There was no soft launch. The door cracked open at ten in the morning and the line was already wrapping past the cafe. Neighbors we’d known for years brought coffee from across the street. One of the regulars at the bakery walked over with a still-warm koulouri and said congrats, kid.
Inside, the shelves were stacked with NY-licensed flower from day one. No grey-market product. No tobacco-shop loophole. Every gram traced back to a state-compliant grower. We had spent eighteen months building the back of the house so the front of the house could just be a store.
The first customer was a guy named George. He bought an eighth of Wedding Cake. He still buys an eighth of Wedding Cake every Friday.
Cross Bay, second wind.
South Queens has its own gravity. The A-train runs above Liberty Ave on stilts the city built in 1916. Cross Bay Boulevard cuts from Howard Beach south through Broad Channel to the Rockaways. Italian. Caribbean. Latino. Bangladeshi. JFK arrivals come down Conduit.
The second store wasn’t a copy of the first. It was a new door in a different room. Different language at the counter. Different night-shift regulars. Same standard at the shelf — every gram lab-tested, every label readable, every answer honest.
The block is the brand.
If someone walks in, picks up the right product for them, walks out, and tells two friends — that’s the whole strategy. Not loyalty points. Not paid ads. Not a metaverse. A neighborhood recommending a neighborhood store. That is the only marketing plan that survives.