From Queens to the Cannabis Cup: Inside Torches, the Social Equity Dream Taking Over NYC’s Most Iconic Cigar Townhouse
Interviewing the Torches team was like talking to one person while chatting with four.
First came José, license holder and big-picture hustler from Jamaica, Queens. Then, Jonathan Santana, a former financial advisor who walked away from banking to bet on weed. Pedro Antonio pops in, the Colombian “spice” of the crew, half-strategist, half-hype man. Finally, there’s William Evans, the “honorary Dominican” and in-house buyer, juggling the call while checking on his sick daughter.
They start the conversation the way a lot of good weed stories begin in New York: in two languages, with jokes and a little bit of biography.
“We’re all Dominican,” Jonathan says.
“And I’m Colombian,” Pedro adds. “Got a little Colombian spice.”
Pedro explains how he was born in the U.S., sent back to Colombia as a kid, came back to New York at four, speaking only Spanish, then got swallowed whole by hip hop and the city.
“My mom says I told her I’d never speak English,” he laughs. “Then New York happened. I learned English, loved hip hop, and never turned back.”
When I tell them the true language is the one you use to curse, everybody cracks up. It’s a throwaway line, but it fits. Torches, which is in Manhattan, is bilingual, bicultural, and very much New York: immigrant roots, street logic, and a really elegant address. A social equity dispensary built by these amazing people.
Torches lives inside the former Nat Sherman Townhouse on 42nd Street, one of the most legendary cigar spaces in the city. And this month, it will become a flagship pickup location for the High Times Cannabis Cup Judges Kits.
If you’ve ever dreamed of what it would look like when legacy New York cannabis finally took over the old money cigar lounges, this is it.
“We always had weed in our story.”
Ask who the Polanco Brothers are and José starts in the most honest place possible.
“As New Yorkers, cannabis has been part of our lives for a very long time,” he says. “I’ve been consuming since I was young, and I’m pretty sure everybody on this call has some kind of experience with cannabis growing up.”
They grew up in Queens in the 90s.
“Some neighborhoods, they got different choices,” José says. “In ours, it was cannabis, mostly. That was the environment. We enjoyed smoking together, and as we saw the game growing, legalization in other states, we knew one day it could be a possibility for us too.”
José came to the U.S. in 1993, at nine years old, not knowing the language. School wasn’t his strong suit. So instead of chasing degrees, he did what a lot of immigrants do when they want to earn their place: he started businesses. He built a family construction company from nothing. He ran car-sharing operations years before the big names took over. At one point, he and his circle had around 35 employees. All of that would turn out to matter in ways none of them could predict.
Because when New York’s social equity program for cannabis finally opened, the criteria were pretty specific: you needed
1. a cannabis-related charge, and
2. a proven track record of running a business for at least a couple of years.
José had both.
“It wasn’t easy,” Jonathan says. “That’s why some big players were kind of upset we got in before they did. They spent all this money lobbying for legalization, and then we show up with more power than they have, because they’re limited in how many stores they can open and how they can enter the rec program.”
They applied in the first round, sweating it out, thinking they might rank high and get in, but they didn’t. Then in 2023, in the second round of licenses, the Polanco Brothers’ name came up.
“Some of my friends thought I was crazy,” José says. “But they helped anyway. Some believed it could happen. The rest is history.”
“Giuliani had a locker down here.”
The hard part wasn’t getting the license. It was everything that came after.
First, they had to find a location in a city where cannabis-friendly landlords were rare, and zoning rules around churches, schools, and other dispensaries made compliant real estate feel like “a needle in a haystack.”
Then they found the former Nat Sherman Townhouse on 42nd Street, a three-story cigar temple just steps from Grand Central. “It has so much history,” Pedro says. “It’s its own story. The who’s who of New York used to be down there in that lounge where José is sitting right now.”
We’re talking hedge funds, banks, clergy, mobsters, politicians, celebrities. There’s a hidden entrance from Fifth Avenue where dignitaries would sneak in without being seen. The lockers in the basement once held private cigar stashes for the city’s elite.
“Giuliani had a locker down here,” they tell me. “The same guy pushing stop-and-frisk laws that ended up impacting so many in our communities was probably smoking cigars in that lounge, thinking through those policies.”
Now, those same rooms are being reclaimed by the very people those policies targeted—through a social equity license, in a legal cannabis shop.
Destiny is a word they use more than once.
When they chose the townhouse, there was a problem with MedMen. The collapsing cannabis giant had a store 860 feet away, and under the rules at the time, that proximity gave MedMen exclusivity.
If MedMen converted from medical to recreational, Torches could never open at Nat Sherman.
“We were stuck for seven months,” Jonathan says. “We couldn’t open. We had to decide: do we walk away and pick another location, or do we wait them out?”
The Office of Cannabis Management even tried to nudge them away from the building, warning them they were passing on easier opportunities.
“They told us, ‘Real estate is so hard to come by. Pick another location. You won’t regret it,’” Pedro recalls. “They said if we stayed, it could be detrimental to the business. But we kept the dream and the vision.”
It really did come down to the shot clock.
If MedMen had filed to convert before the deadline, Torches wouldn’t exist in this format and the landlord might have demolished the building for a skyscraper.
Instead, the floodgates opened in early 2024. Torches secured its proximity and started building.
Built by the same hands that grew up on the legacy side.
Torches wasn’t dropped in by a corporate general contractor, but built by the same family and friends who used to hustle to get by.
“We came in as builders,” José says. “We have a construction company. My brothers are the builders. Everything you see here was built by us.”
The townhouse already had something no other building on 42nd Street had: industrial-grade ventilation, designed for heavy cigar smoke. One of only three buildings in the entire state with that level of air circulation, they tell me. A structure literally built for people to consume something in comfort.
“It was meant to be a consumption lounge,” Pedro says. “The bones of the building were destined for cannabis.”
For now, the lounge is used for private events and meetings while New York slowly figures out its consumption regulations. But the infrastructure is there, locked and loaded.
“Like Bob Marley said, ‘what’s profitable’?”
William, the buyer, is the one with the deepest hands-on cannabis history. He started in the legacy market as a teenager, moved with the plant, watched the evolution from cheap corner bags to modern branded eighths and solventless everything.
“We really got our ears to the streets,” William says. “We’re nice people, but we’re not pushovers. People come to show us products. We can tell what’s good and what’s trash. We’ve learned a lot about marketing, too. Some folks come in trying to get over on us, and we close the door. Then two weeks later, they crawl back like, ‘We can do 50% off.’”
For Torches, “Torches-worthy” is a combination of Quality, Price and Relationship: brands that show up, do activities, educate, and give something back to the community.
“There are products for everybody,” William says. “Some people want the best of the best. Some just want a good deal, like a cigarette. We want to make sure the $25 eighth is actually decent, and the $50 eighth really earns that price.”
“Profitable” for José, though, goes beyond the ledger.
“Like Bob Marley said, what’s profitable?” He remembers Marley’s philosophy. “The relationships we’re building here, the currency we’re building for the culture—that’s more than just financial. We’re paying our bills, we’re growing, we’ll open more locations, sure. But profit for me is being in this space, having this conversation, building something for our people.”
“You shouldn’t be buying weed from the same guy you’re buying a sandwich from.”
New York has been cracking down hard on the unlicensed market for the past year, raiding smoke shops, padlocking corner stores selling gummies and mystery “zaza” out of glass cases.
The Polanco crew has complicated feelings about it.
“If you’re asking about enforcement on illegal stores on 42nd, we weren’t too impacted,” Jonathan says. “Here, rent is very high. Most of the raids hit community stores and corner spots in rougher neighborhoods. But if you’re asking about the legacy market, that’s where we all come from. We did the right thing to get here, and we pay a lot of tax. But I still respect legacy growers that take pride in their product, people who built real communities before legalization.”
The line for them is clear: they don’t support people flooding the market with contaminated, unsafe, or purely opportunistic products.
“It’s like what’s happening with some of the hemp stuff,” José says. “People putting anything out there, no pride in the product. If you’re doing that, unregulated, without caring, I don’t stand with you. But the legacy people who’ve been growing, who care, I wish them nothing but the best. I hope they all find a way into licensing and bring that fire to the legal market.”
Then Jonathan drops the line that should probably be printed on a poster somewhere:
“You shouldn’t be buying weed from the same guy you’re buying a sandwich from.”
Fair enough.
“We are the torch.”
Their relationship with High Times started at a cannabis expo and through Josh Kesselman.
“William spotted him,” Pedro says. “‘Yo, Josh is here.’ We went straight over. He was super cool, very real. We showed him a video of the store before renovations, with Nat Sherman still intact. He was blown away.”
Later, Josh came to visit Torches in person, unannounced. He filmed a tour of the entire space and posted it on Instagram, giving them a massive boost with zero ask in return.
“For us, that was huge.”
So why Torches as the flagship pickup location for the High Times Cannabis Cup Judges Kits?
“We really come from this,” says William. “We’re connected to the streets, but we also have this beautiful location in the heart of the city. There are smaller stores with culture, but they don’t have what we have. I feel like we really shine a light on the culture. And we’re still the little guys compared to the big companies. It’s a David and Goliath story.”
Then José brings it home.
“The reason you chose us is because we are Torches,” he says. “We are the light for the ones before us and the ones after us. When you accomplish something, we want to hand you your torch. We picked a name that means something to share, something to celebrate. We want to be like the Olympics. The Cup is the Olympics, and we’re the torch right behind it.”
He’s not exaggerating about location, either. This isn’t just Times Square tourism. It’s 42nd and Grand Central, a literal gateway where the whole world passes through.
“Every tourist, every businessperson, every kind of New Yorker comes through here,” José says. “We’re not just saying cannabis is coming. We’re saying it’s coming elegant, strong, smart, with swag and substance.”
“The people get to decide.”
“We always heard about the High Times Cannabis Cup,” William says. “We’d be like, ‘Oh my God, that brand won it.’ But we were never a part of it. It was all West Coast. Now we get to host the kits in New York.”
They’re showcasing the kits in custom glass cases upstairs, surrounded by the kind of old-world architecture that wasn’t built with weed in mind but somehow fits it perfectly.
“We’re curators,” Pedro says. “We’d love nothing more than to test every kit. But what we love about the Cup is that the people get to decide. No politics. No backroom deals. Just the community judging.”
What they want people to feel when they pick up their Judges Kits:
When I ask what vibe they want people to feel walking into Torches to grab their Cannabis Cup kits, José keeps it simple.
“The same thing they already feel when they come in,” he says. “We want them to know the level of quality in our menu is the same level of quality in the kits. We’ll have budtenders ready to educate, so people know what they’re picking up and can judge better.”
William adds the emotional side.
“I want people to be excited,” he says. “It’s fun. It’s different. You’re part of history. This townhouse is already historic, and now we’re launching something historic again.”
“The people get to decide,” adds Pedro.
“We want to inspire people like us to not give up”
At the end of the interview, I asked if there was anything they wanted to add.
“We just want to inspire people,” says José. “People like us to not give up, to get up and do things. To see that there are professional careers in this industry. We happen to be first right now, but we want to be good at it so other people feel like, ‘We can all do it.’ The more people do it, the better the space is going to be, the better the cannabis, the better the products.”
Pedro sees it as a responsibility.
“You’re talking to people at ground zero,” he says. “New York is still in its infancy as a legal market. We’re just crossing a billion in sales, pushing toward two, aiming at six. It’s still stigmatized. But we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to leave a legacy in New York cannabis.”
If you’re in New York, this is the moment.
The High Times Cannabis Cup is officially in the 212, and Torches is the place to grab your Judges Kit.
Step inside the old Nat Sherman townhouse, pick up your box, and make history this year.
Photos by Kyle Rosner.
<p>The post From Queens to the Cannabis Cup: Inside Torches, the Social Equity Dream Taking Over NYC’s Most Iconic Cigar Townhouse first appeared on High Times.</p>
