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THE ONLY STREET IN THE UNIVERSE: Remembering the Italian Market, Part One of Two
by Molly Russakoff
March 2005
The first time I encountered an artichoke was at the Italian Market on a trip with the Girl Scouts. I was ten years old; we were shopping for an international dinner. After I moved to the neighborhood myself, when my son was still in a stroller, he would see the piles of artichokes and cry for them as if they were lollipops. “Artichoke! Artichoke!” An artichoke looks like a prehistoric rose. It's the color of army fatigues. Each of its petals is tipped with a needle-thin thorn. It must be eaten with great tact, nibbled and sucked at the base of its pulpy leaves. Eventually, you will be rewarded with its heart, mellow and succulent. An artichoke is a vegetable out of a fairy tale.
It's been two years since I opened my bookstore here, my third business in the market, my nineteenth year in South Philly. It is a neighborhood that scared and intrigued me as a little girl. I never thought I would end up down here, calling it my home with such great allegiance. I was a Jewish girl from Elkins Park, an elegant Victorian suburb. I grew up in the comfort of lawns and porches and the music of mothers' voices calling children in to dinner. The market was a carnival of gutted pig carcasses, glittering fish lined in boxes of ice staring at me with their stunned expressions and gnarled old women slapping flies off of pyramids of fruit with cat-o-nine-tails fashioned from strips of newspaper. Sharp perfumes wended their way out of the cheese shops, exotic as opium. It was a place apart from anything else. I didn't come here often when I was a girl, but even so, my few visits stand out as strongly as trips to the circus and days at the beach.
Now the merchants have become tempered and polite, but back when I was young, they were tough and lusty. When a woman or a ripe girl passed, they would catcall and proposition and hold up the phallic fruits lewdly. When someone tried to pick their own produce, they would curse them out with violent force. Everyone kept baseball bats behind their stands to mete justice to petty thieves. The practices have changed as the generations turned over and there was the rising realization that they were losing their grip on the food-buying public. The shape and nature of the family had changed and competition from supermarkets cut deeply into their profits. Begrudgingly, the code of piracy gave way to courtesy.
I remember the market as it was in the glory days, the way the old-timers talk about it. I've been down here long enough to have seen a lot of changes, a lot crazy things. But my memories are shallow compared to the people who grew up and old here. They talk about the past almost as if it wasn't real. They get this sweet look on their faces when they talk about the crowds, the characters, the families, the soups and fruits and cheeses and plates of macaronis and seven fishes for Christmas and warm breads and all of the mothers pressing their own pizelles, each with her own special recipe for biscotti, her own secrets for meatballs. When I tell them that it's only a matter of time before the crowds return, they look at me as if I just don't understand.
Anatomically, I would consider Giordano's the muscular right arm of the market. If you follow the line across the shoulder which is Washington Ave. to Eighth Street we will find the underused and overcompensating left arm, Capt. Jesse G.'s, where you can buy fresh fish, produce, off-brand soda and cheap packaged cookies. A huge sign above the crab baskets promises: “ANYTHING OVER 12 DEAD WE WILL REPLACE!!” Jesse G. is reputed to be the black sheep of the Giordano family. When alive, he was a scrapper, threatening shoppers with a pistol for minor infractions. He once cursed my mother mercilessly and threatened to sic his wife on her for asking for ripe, rather than overripe, peaches.
The throbbing heart of the Italian Market stretches from Washington to Christian. It has survived and thrived tirelessly even as the rest of the market was quote unquote dying. During that time, everyone was trying to pin its decline on something tangible, something alien and invasive. Most often you would hear about the Asians, the “Chinee” who were actually Koreans: Never mind that it was the Korean merchants who actually kept the market breathing during its most dire time. But still, the bulk of the third generation businesses, on these three blocks are Italian: the deLucas, Espositos, Anastasis, Massinas, Renzullis, Girardos, Canullis, Espositos, Garganos, Grassis, Mignuccis, Lombardos, Micalis. Here are the grandsons who never stopped working once they started, who remember their grandfathers as youngish men in aprons dealing and arguing, huddled over fire cans, shifting from foot to foot on the packed snow and suffering in the blaring sunlight. No matter how many ethnicities are layered upon it, it will always be the Italian Market.
*** In 1986, I was working at a vegetarian restaurant on South Street and I got in a fight with my boss and we had words, the last of which were “Fuck you, Nancy,” as I stormed out through the sparse crowd of murmuring diners and, as a finale, slipped on the rainy sidewalk and fell flat on my ass. I was reeling and humiliated and still needed the piddling income the job afforded me. So I called my father, crying, and he decided then and there to open a bookstore in the Italian Market where I could work undisturbed. This is how I ended up as a Ninth Street merchant. My father had opened and closed maybe twenty bookstores in his life, several of them to accommodate his unemployable children, so this one went up quickly and easily. It was makeshift but it was a bookstore and within a year, my then-husband and I bought it from him, took in a table of used records and this is how I became a businesswoman.
I was a poet and my husband was a bass player in King of Siam, an esoteric rock band. The store was good to us as artists. It was very low maintenance and, between the two of us, we only had to work twenty hours a week each. It was a funky living, in the best sense. There was no transition between work and our real selves, no corporate or subservient day gigs. Business was good enough and real estate was low enough so we were able to buy a five-bedroom house slightly south of the market. We were pretty happy then. When I found out that “La Cosa Nostra” means “our thing,” I thought it would be a fitting title for a love poem.
La Cosa Nostra
The night of the Chicken Man hit I was eating an Armenian lover's knot killing time, waiting for you to come home from your double shift. It was close to midnight. The stars were aligned for trouble and commotion in the sky. After the gunbursts broke, the air filled with sirens, the way they say it fills with the scent of magnolias in the deep south and a lovely show of revolving lights shone through the Venetian blinds red after blue after red.
I was in bed resisting the call to follow them, as I was raised to in the suburbs. How placid the crime was there: all white collar, the occasional JD crazed in a flower bed, Southern Comfort scalding his innards. Here, the neighbors turn away, unnaturally silent, the very neighbors who are always at the curb to inspect the least nothing: a dog turd, a parked car.
People were surprised to see books and music crammed in with the butchers and fishmongers, but it wasn't hard for them to make the leap once they knew we were there. They made us part of their weekly routine: Onions, potatoes, oranges, ground beef, Charlie Parker, Moby Dick … Most of our customers were black blue-collar workers, looking to replace the records they remembered from the 1970s, and collectors who came from around the city and, for that matter, the world to rifle through the bins. We rented the store from Helen Tursi, one of the Ninth Street women who never married and never moved from the home of their childhood, the home above the store that their parents ran. She was one of the Catholic women of the Old World who remained stationary as the New World constellated around them. Helen has since died of lupus, but a few of these women still remain. Marge still runs her mother's linen shop, Imported Fancy Linens at 9th and Kimball, although it is rarely open. Mary still peddles fruit and vegetables across the street beside her two brothers, Popeye and Carmen. Mary stands out in the elements, throughout the seasons, in her kerchief and sweaters, asking “May I help you missus,” ageless in her aged demeanor. She will tell you proudly “I never moved to the left of me, never moved to the right of me. I stayed right here.” As every Philadelphia artist is obliged to produce some piece of art in the picturesque Market:
In the past, the children played Hanky Lady while their mothers cleaned house.
They'd salvage the purple pear papers and smooth them
with their hands. Delicately, they'd lay them in the empty box
given them by the linen salesman. In the past, embroidered
white on white, the hankies fluttered in the white
knuckless hands of the sneezing town ladies. And the breeze
and the milk glass bowl on the sill where the cat lapped
milk, sunlit, and its pale patches of calico. Today
the ugly excessive music the children play brought me back
to myself, my clawlike hand clinking change into the hand of a Chinaman.
Mary and her brothers are famous in the market for the beauty of their produce and their devotion to the old ways. They don't believe in refrigeration and buy only enough to sell in a day, which they invariably do. They are among the few who still hawk, calling out their strange music above their wares over and over. Popeye calls “How you gonna go wrong, folks?” or the cryptic chant Epepe, which turns out to mean Pretty pretty pretty in Italian. Carmen calls “Hey, how many?” and Mary drones, a low murmur, “Try my golden apples now, sweet as honey. Got the money.” The tradition of hawking has died out considerably in past ten years or so. When I first moved down here, most of the hucksters still had their own refrains. My crazy neighbor Carmen Lerro, another of the many Carmens I've met since moving here, used to say “Ham ham ham” over and over and over so that, during the first weeks after opening the store, my dreams were backed by the distant echo of Ham ham ham. A banana man once went into a veritable trance screaming Fifty Cents Fifty Cents Fifty Cents Fifty Cents until a old black lady finally brought him to, scolding him “Fifty cents for what, you damn fool?”
When I first moved in, the Market was supported by people who needed to shop here. The bargains were, and still are, significant. I often proselytize about it: ten lemons for a dollar, the same lemons that go for fifty cents a piece at the supermarket. Three heads of romaine for a dollar, your choice of grapes, red, green or black, tender beans. Both the chicken and the egg for half what you're used to paying. I've always been grateful to the poor folk who made their weekly pilgrimage, dragging rickety folding shopping carts on and off the buses, through several connections, loading up for the week and returning when their supplies ran low. They kept the market afloat for years, when the local allegiance shifted to Acme and Pathmark.
Weekends have always brought the tourists and suburbanites, attracted by the European flavor and specialty shops. To them, Ninth Street is like a culinary theme park, gritty and authentic, and the bargains are a kick rather than a necessity. This seems to be the angle that is being taken as its Renaissance is prodded along by the merchants and the city and developers. I'm glad the market will survive, but it's strange to think of the polish it will surely be given. It's inevitable. All of its lovely roughness will be smoothed out when the money comes in. All that will be left are photos and stories of the crippled produce carts and fire cans and torn canvas awnings pitched at conflicting angles.
[continued...]
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