Faraco Knife & Slicer

Life on the edge. They call him the Knife Man, and his sharpening shops may be Philadelphia's last. He'll do hoes, saws, anything with an edge, but restaurants sustain him. Every Thursday morning, he enters the Dining Car restaurant on Frankford Avenue, walks quietly to the kitchen, takes the old tools, delivers new ones, collects his money and lea... ves. "He's in and out like a flash," says owner Nancy Morozin. It's one of 50 stops or so that Emory Csikany - the Knife Man - makes daily as he works on the cutting edge of cutting edges, a lone figure working to give Philadelphia a finer point. Sharpening hoes to handsaws, Csikany (pronounced cheh-KAHN-ee), 61, owns what may be the last street-corner knife-sharpening shop in town. Neither he nor the handful of suburban knife sharpeners know of anyone else left in the city. The Yellow Pages lists just his store at Front and Rising Sun Avenue in Feltonville. Some hardware stores - such as Bruskin's in South Philadelphia - still sharpen knives, but it is a sideline, not a life's work. Home sharpeners and inexpensive stainless-steel blades have cut the need for knife men. Csikany's daily grind is literally that - a grinding wheel and a blade's dull edge. "It's not easy. You just make a living, pay your bills. Good years? No, you don't have many good years," he says. He was not born into the business - he was adopted. Csikany left Hungary, convulsed by revolution, for the United States in 1956 at the age of 15, with five of his friends. Through a church in Oreland, he found a home with Frank Faraco and his family. And so he went to work for his adopted father at Faraco Cutlery at Fifth and Cayuga. He worked in the shop and on a truck with a grinding wheel powered by a gasoline engine, sharpening sewing shears and carving knives door to door, street by street. "There were a lot of knife places then," he remembers. "At Sixth and Rockland, and Fifth and Duncannon. There was one at 20-something and Allegheny, and Kensington and Ontario. There was a guy on Passyunk Avenue ...Read More