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THE ONLY STREET IN THE UNIVERSE: Remembering the Italian Market, Part Two of Two
by Molly Russakoff
March 2005
My great Ninth Street moment occurred one morning on my way to open my store. I was coming from my apartment on Tenth. As I came within earshot, a roaring cheer arose. It's an uplifting feeling to hear this sound. I pretended it was in my honor. As I walked closer, I saw Sly Stallone. He was in his sweats and stocking cap, his Rocky regalia. He ran past me. Studio goons were barking directions at the mob lining the sidewalks. A gaggle of breathless girls followed him, panting and squealing. I had happened upon the shooting of Rocky IV or V or VI. The Italian Stallion was down here to glorify and be glorified, to squeeze the last buck from his manufactured humble beginnings. We were all frantic and panting and cheering and screaming with euphoria as he passed, the caricature of his square chin, puppy dog eyes and packed frame, smug and unspeakably famous. A phony vendor, a plant, standing beside a glowing fire can, obeyed a terse order to “Throw the apple! Throw the fucking apple!” Sly caught the apple and took a bite without missing a beat, running and smiling his twisted smile. And the crowd, having lost its mind, followed suit, grabbing fruit from the piled stands and pelting him, much to the director's disgust and frustration. You could almost hear the soundtrack: Gonna fly now. Flying high now. It was my lucky day.
On the same corner, I witnessed what I consider to be the Market's greatest tragedy: the death of Joey Girardo. I don't think Joey ever left Ninth Street. I don't think, in his entire life, the noise of the Market was ever out of earshot. He was born to it and he died here on this corner and there should be a monument to him.
Joey was sweet and friendly. It was his pleasure to say hello to you whenever he passed. He always talked to me about Elvis Presley because of the music in my store. To my friend Anthony Renzulli, he always talked about the day that Pat's Steaks opened. This was the biggest and best day in his life. Pat closed off the street and threw a grand opening party that went on and on into the night. Anthony also grew up on Ninth Street but was worldlier than Joey. He was and still is funny and friendly. He has an easy laugh and knows everybody. Joey was an awkward kid, even as an adult. But that day they hung together, and Joey would never forget it the rest of his life. The world was small around him and Pat's grand opening glittered in his memory.
Joey spent his life at Ninth and Montrose, selling produce and tending to his arthritic father. As sweet as Joey was, his father was bitter. He was mean and bent and demanding and Joey spent his days beside him, softening his tirades when a customer reached a hand out to test a peach or taste a grape. Every morning at dawn, Joey and his father drove to the food distribution center to buy the produce for the day. The old man would wait in the truck while his son wheeled the crates and boxes to the stand. Then he would come back to wheel his father, who clung to the flat bed, the last parcel of the morning. Every evening, they would pass side by side, Joey supporting the old man as he hobbled along the street, the only street in the universe. He gave up everything for his father. He was a cheerful prisoner of his fruit stand.
One morning, Joey was approaching Washington Ave., coming back from buying a hot dog, just as a bread truck was making the turn onto Ninth Street. The truck sped up to make the light and hit a parked car. Then, in his panic, the driver backed up, running Joey over. It was a gruesome and agonizing afternoon as Joey lay pinned beneath the black tires, his upper torso exposed and his legs in the shadow of the trailer. He lived for three more hours as they tried to save him or disengage him or somehow deal with the puzzling horror of the situation. There was a weird deathwatch as business, continued a pall of silence hung over Giordano's as customers and money takers uneasily completed their transactions. Word went up and down the street until his vital signs finally came to rest and the truck was rolled away. When they repaved the street, there was a movement to embed a plaque at this corner in his honor, but the sentiment was overruled by jealous neighbors who thought if they were going to do that, why not put a plaque in for their cousin or mother or uncle. So the street went down smooth, which is a sin because nobody had given so much of his life to this street than Joey.
***
I don't want to talk too much about the mob, because “I don't know nothing,” but I do want to tell the story about Joe Fudgy who had the dress shop next to my store. Joe was what is called half a wise guy. He liked to play with the mob. He liked to know what was going on, to hang out on the edges and emulate them. He always had something going on himself, but I don't know what it was. Drugs or numbers or something. A humorless circle of older men in custom-cut suits always hung out in his dank dress shop. The shop was lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb and the dresses were all five or ten years out of fashion and cheesy even for their time. They hung limply and sparsely on the pipe metal racks. Once I thought, I'd give Joe a play, and went to buy a Fudgy dress. The store reeked of cigars and the men fell silent at the sight of me. I had the clear impression that I was an intruder, even though Joe did his best to serve me, and I felt even more awkward walking out when I couldn't find anything that I would ever conceivably wear. Fudgy was actually quite likeable in a backhanded way. He was right out of central casting, a character De Niro would play for Scorcese. He was younger than his cronies and good-looking, always dressed to the nines in his sporty shirts, tapered slacks and pointy slip-on shoes. He drove a beat up station wagon, which his long-suffering wife would pull up, packed with his kids, to retrieve him for dinner and drop him off at the shop on demand. More often you would see him with deeply tanned and coiffed women who would mince in and out of his shop, staying for suspicious intervals only to be replaced by another version of themselves a week or two later. Joe was funny and cocky and mean and sweet. He used to say to me, with that Italian shrug, “Hey, you're bored. I'm bored. Let's cheat!” I would laugh and he would smile and shrug again. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
One day Fudgy showed up with the requisite dark glasses on a swollen face, walking with two canes. He was stooped and humble, two words I had never associated with him before. There was an embarrassed silence on the street as he was accompanied into his store by one of his colleagues. Later that afternoon the story circulated that he was hitting on a girl at a club on Delaware Avenue and her boyfriend, the bouncer, beat him up. A couple of months later, during the John Stanfa trials, another story hit the front pages. After turning state's witness, Stanfa's creepy hitman Joe Veasey had a splashy day on the stand, gleefully telling of his exploits on the mob's payroll. One of the many smirking stories he told was about how this guy “Joe Fudge” was getting him nervous by telling people that he wanted to kill him. So Veasey had his friend bring Joe to his apartment at Eighth and Washington and tried to drill his head. Yes. They tried to drill his head with a Black and Decker. “When he came in, I smacked him on the head with the side of the drill then I drilled him,” Veasey testified. When pressed to clarify what he meant by drilled, he described how he poked around his body and scalp with the drill until hair got caught in the mechanism and the bit eventually broke. Joe escaped with his life, a couple of broken knees and a small portion of his spirit. Since then, after a lifetime on Ninth Street and the lifetime of his father before him, the dress shop was closed. We never see him down here anymore. Once, ironically, I ran into him at Home Depot. He was physically healed but quieter and seemed more cowed. But it was good to see him, to hear him call me sweetheart. When we went our separate ways, I kept saying “I can't believe it! That was Joe Fudgy!” over and over, as if I'd just spoken to Marilyn Monroe. My daughter was in the stroller then and she aped my sentiment and inflections. “That was so good to see Joe Fudgy!” That night she had one of her first remembered dreams, that Joe Fudgy had pushed her into a sandwich.
***
I became involved in the merchant's association in the late 1980s, arguably the nadir of the market's demise. Nobody wanted to shop here now that there was a supermarket in every neighborhood, catering to the masses. The food-buying public, given the choice, went with cleanliness and convenience over value and tradition. The market was suffering.
I originally joined the association, as many of us did, because of the trash dispute of 1987. We called it a strike. Disposal World, the trash company, called it a boycott. It happened during the summer of the year my father opened the store for me. It was unbelievable. Back then, nobody even used dumpsters. They would just heave their trash in a slop pile at the curb and sometime during the night, trucks would come by and shovel it all in, leaving smears of fetid garbage in the gutters for the rats to enjoy. One trash company handled the whole market. Every Tuesday, a prune-faced goon would come around for what felt suspiciously like a shake down. Being in the book business, I generated maybe a bagful every week and the city pick up took care of that. Still, I had to cough up five bucks when The Man came around every week. Cash only. No receipt. He would add my little fin to a huge roll of bills, grunt, and be on his way. One day, they demanded a sixty per cent increase and everyone balked. We said they wanted to kill us. They said they were losing money on us every week, hauling our trash upstate and as far as Ohio. It wasn't long into the strike until the mountains of garbage and cardboard obscured the storefronts and the stench was unspeakable. I was interviewed for Channel 6 news, my first appearance on TV since singing “Maresydotes and Doseydotes” on The Pixanne Show when I was eight. The segment started as a long shot from the stand across the street, that showed my head bobbing at the pinnacle of a trash heap. Cut to a close-up of me answering the stupid question: “What do you think of this situation?” What else could I say? “It's disgusting. It's completely unappetizing. Who would want to buy food here?” Who ever said that any publicity is good publicity?
Although they thought they had us by the balls, the strike was a call to arms. Many of the merchants, who had been wringing their hands in silence, came out en masse against the evil trash collectors. I attended the big community meeting at Palumbo Recreation Center. The merchants were there. The neighbors were there. The trash men were there and all the politicians were there, from city council wannabes all the way up to Vince Fumo. Everyone was mad, except for the politicians, who were, well, politicians. They suffered us. I measured my breath as I sat through the evening's melee. Still a Girl Scout at heart, I had come with a plan I had been formulating as I sat in my empty store. Why don't we start a recycling program? Take destiny into our own hands, get some good press for a change and even make a few bucks while we're at it. At that time, companies were still buying cardboard, and pig farmers would actually come out to your establishment to pick up organic garbage. I had done my homework, spoke to the recycling companies and called the president of the Reading Terminal Market, where they had been doing it for years. I screwed up enough nerve to raise my hand and made sure I kept it up throughout the meeting until I was called on. My voice quivered as I spoke, but I managed to state my case. I basically got a pat on the head for my efforts and provided a little relief of puzzled silence before the meeting turned back to the squaring off between merchant and trash collector. The raw-throated cursing. The smug bemusement of power. The placating politicians who would eventually take the matter into some back room and see to it that the status quo was restored. Everyone ended up paying the increase, but that's just the way it is. Trash is a problem. What are you gonna do? The next day, the streets were cleaned and it was business as usual. Several weeks later, Pippy de Luca, the president of the association and dining room manager of Villa di Roma, would come into my store, extend his hand to me and invite me to the next merchants' meeting.
In the early days, the general merchant association meetings were mostly cathartic. We met in the dayroom of the Tolentine Community Center, the local senior citizen center. People would come to moan and rail and place blame and bellyache about the good old days. In retrospect, I realize that we were all depressed. Day after day, we were all going through the motions of opening our shops but nobody was doing any business. The Market had taken on a weariness, a sadness. The buildings were becoming vacant and falling into disrepair. Even the operational businesses, the stalwarts, seemed to have taken on the sepia tones of an old photograph. The asphalt had been tarred over so many times that the iron wheels of the fruit stands sunk into the street, giving them an aged list. We began to talk, in a scattershot way, about what had to be done.
Eventually, the city got wind that we were galvanizing and began to insinuate itself upon us. They began to make us offers we couldn't refuse. City officials came to meet with us, maybe once a month, around a banquet table at the Villa. On one side, the tailored City Hallers with their measured speech and ten year plans. On the other side, the level-headed merchants defending their turf, one eye on the clock, anxious to get back to their stores, and on the fray, the fire-tempered hucksters saying “We don't want your fucking money.”
Finally a sort of lurching velocity built and over time we were able to effect some profound changes. The aging sewer system was replaced and the street was repaved with durable concrete. A smattering of merchants took advantage of the façade rebate program that the city offered, and although the street didn't gleam in its wake, there was the impression of renewal, of the market being pulled up by its bootstraps. The city also picked up the tab to replace the corrugated metal awnings that rusted and listed over the sidewalks, like mouthful of bad teeth. Now the vendors stand under fresh new canopies, all uniform, all in the colors of the Italian flag. With the city investing so heavily, it became clear that there were designs on the Italian Market. Now, there is this constant feeling of expectation, of mixed regret and excitement, as buildings that sat for years change hands. Now, everyone seems to want to be a part of the Italian Market Renaissance.
***
There is much made of the third generation businesses that are braided through the market and rightly so. They provide a living history, rather than the preserved and reenacted histories that we are served in other sections of the city. There is a deep pride, a sense of carrying on that is often lost in America, as the children leave the farm for the city or advance the family fortune into professions or snake off into the arts or jump the fence by marrying into another legacy altogether. When the generations follow in line, there is a sense of familiarity that runs beneath everything, warmth and enmity and complicated relationships. The soil is rich and fertile.
But for all the strength and stability that a third generation business implies, there is dramatic potential for pathos. The new blood doesn't always arrive as a fresh infusion but as a gory trickle. The father heaps an unwieldy burden upon the back of his eldest child, who staggers beneath it. The prodigal son is propelled by guilt and doubt and a monstrous sense of duty. He lurches forward and backward, as the business bloats and wheezes, until he is shouldering a corpse. Then, as if he were a murderer, he must dispose of the remains.
Joe Litto Jr. did not want to take over the family bakery but, when his father's health failed, he was pulled back to it as if by a huge magnet. He had moved to New York to pursue a career in acting. He was making some strides, landing roles in independent films. He married a beautiful veterinarian. He was happy. He grew up in the apartment above the store and worked there as soon as he came of age. He remembered the bakery with affection, but he always dreamt beyond it. He told me a story about one of the times he walked out, ostensibly never to return. The customer wanted a nude Raggedy Ann cake and they argued heatedly over her nipples and pubic hair. Joe couldn't take it anymore. He just left. He would return and leave this way several times before setting off to follow his dream with determination and dignity.
Litto's Bakery had been a neighborhood landmark since the 1930s. It still had the original enamel tiled walls, ornate crown molding and built-in oak pastry cases backed by beveled mirrors. It was a charming place. When Joe finally decided to return, he threw everything he had into making the place his own. With some renovations and a New York chef, he turned the old South Philly warhorse into a fashionable bistro. It was popular, attracting a young, Center City crowd. Then, after nine years, he closed the doors and followed his wife back to New York. Everyone was mystified. It seemed to be doing so well. Meanwhile, around the corner and down the street, my business was failing and my marriage was falling apart. Our bohemian lifestyle didn't weather the pressures of children and all the attendant responsibilities. My husband's brood, which had once seemed so sexy, did not age well. Now he was just a sullen grouch. He seemed to disapprove of everything I did and said. One morning, in the middle of an argument, he spit at me and called me a stupid fucking bitch. A small shard of pride glimmered in the darkness. “I'm a Jewish girl from Elkins Park,” I thought. “I don't have to take this.” That afternoon, with a 4 year-old at my side and a baby on my hip, I moved back in with my parents, who now lived above their bookstore in Center City. It was a difficult fall from grace. For two years I huddled in my little in-law apartment with my kids, trying my best to raise them and figuring, figuring, figuring on how to recover and regain the ground I'd lost. This is when I became involved with Gene Lefevre.
Gene was an architect and real estate developer. He lived behind my parents in a huge brick house that he designed himself. He razed four little townhouses to make room for it. My parents didn't like him. When he built his house, which they called a mansion, he completely obstructed their view of the quaint, winding street that had delighted them when they moved here. He once tried to enmesh them in a shady real estate scheme. My parents are retired schoolteachers. He was asking them to put up their nest egg. They didn't trust him from day one.
I, on the other hand, was completely enamored by him. I thought he had the vim and vigor of a young Kennedy. Compared to my gloomy circumstances, he was like a sunny and gusty day. Gene used to take me out to lunch to talk about my plight and brainstorm about how I might resurrect myself. At that point, I would have been grateful just for the free lunch, but he also believed in me. He wanted to help me.
Every hair on his body must have come to attention when I finally announced that I wanted to open a luncheonette in the Italian Market. He had designs on the area and had already begun to buy up properties. He told me to go look at the old Litto place on Christian Street, just off Ninth. It had been up for sale for two years. Maybe we could get a deal on it.
The building had been vacant for two years when I read the perky sign in the window. “Charming bakery for sale … Just clean it up and go to work!” It certainly needed some cleaning up. I will never forget the mouse-speckled box of lard that lay open on the baker's bench or the trays of ancient pralines that were left to cool on the speed rack. Joe Litto had left everything behind, from the coveted family recipes down to his shoes and underwear at the foot of the bed in the huge, ramshackle apartment upstairs. You could practically see his outline, where he crashed through the wall, desperate to escape. I don't know why I didn't notice this, why I chose to believe the realtor's patter instead. The failure rate for new restaurants is ninety-five percent. I had no money, no real managerial experience, no concept of the mechanism behind the food service industry. I was a divorced mother with two young children. What I did have was a driving desperation to get back on my feet. And I had Gene Lefevre cheering me on. I had no business opening a restaurant, but I did it anyway.
Gene made me a deal that was, literally, too good to be true. He would purchase the building. I would “clean it up and get to work” and in two years, when I was rolling in dough, I would buy it back from him for what he paid for it plus his cash investment plus twenty percent. It was going to be great. That's what he kept telling me. “It's going to be great,” he would say through his frozen smile. This was the punch line of a joke about an impotent real estate developer that he told me once over lunch at a German beer haüs. It took me a year and a half to renovate the place. The 900 square foot kitchen, which seemed like such a wonderful selling point, turned out to be a graveyard of aging commercial kitchen equipment, which I had to excavate and eventually dispose of, piece by piece. The intimate dining room was infused with the odor of human and feline excrement that seeped through the floorboards of the squalid apartment above it. The plumbing, the heating, the floors, the walls: nothing was salvageable, but I tried to salvage them anyway. Little by little, Gene fed me the cash I needed to finish the project and finally open the doors.
By the time Molly's Café opened, the actual Molly was battered and brain-dead. But the restaurant was popular from the time it opened. There were lines out front on weekends. It got lots of good press. I was touted as heralding the new age of the Italian Market. Still, I was miserable. The workload was untenable. I was hiring, firing, shopping, cooking, cleaning, hostessing, exterminating, banking and bookkeeping. I was at the mercy of drunken line cooks and haughty refrigerator repairmen. And my children, my poor children … I was tending to them with the spare elbow that wasn't being used to prop open the walk-in door. Now, when asked about my experience, I toss off a little one-liner: I much prefer eating in restaurants to owning them. Back then, when the bells of St. Paul's would chime at six, just before I had to wake up, I would murmur: “Ask not for whom the bells toll. They toll for thee.”
I carried on for another six months, fielding problem after problem, until Gene came on board as a partner, along with John Canciellere. John was a wiry little man with a tuft of thinning red hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. He had opened and closed something like forty restaurants in half as many years. At the moment, he owned the little Italian bistro across the street from me. The Butcher's Café, as it was ominously named, was another Gene Lefevre production.
John had an awful reputation. The guy at the restaurant supply actually spit when I mentioned his name. There were stories about him outrunning angry purveyors who chased after him, demanding payment. When my friend Frankie de Luca heard that I was involved with him, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “You're swimming with a shark.” I trusted Frankie. He had been in the business since he was a kid. But there was nothing I could do. Within two months, John and Gene rented the business out from under me to a couple from Cherry Hill.
Gene let me live in the apartment above the restaurant for a year as I figured out where to go next. This was to compensate me for my labor and to assuage his conscience. Gene, as he told me himself, was known as “the developer with a heart.” He had a reputation to uphold. Everyday I had to walk through the dining room, past my old customers, through the fragrance of my old recipes. For a while, I considered moving out of the area altogether, but my heart kept me here. A year later, I was back on Ninth Street, opening my bookstore.
I moved into my current location a year ago April. My parents came through again and bought the building to rent to me. Some kids never grow up. Somewhere along the line, the used book business began to seem like not such a bad thing after all. It was a clean and simple living. I felt like Dorothy returning to Kansas. All of my old neighbors welcomed me back with open arms. “It's good to have you back on the street,” they said. And to think I was only thirty yards away. It was good to be home.
***
About two weeks after I moved into my building, I was awakened by sirens and looked out my window to see a few tendrils of smoke coming out of the apartment windows above Esposito's. A smattering of neighbors was gathering on the adjacent sidewalk. A few minutes later, the windows filled with smoke and suddenly the entire building was burning. Layer upon layer of sirens wailed as engines rolled in and the crowd thickened. Police paced, conferring between themselves and holding back the crowds. Fire fighters smashed in the plate glass that flanked the store and dark smoke rolled out into the street, but the crowd still gathered. I could smell the smoke through my closed windows and hear the popping of neon and the shattering of glass. My beautiful Esposito's! My gleaming butcher shop! I thought of all the times I waited in the amorphous line for service, the wise-cracking countermen calling me darling and Molly my love above the heads of the other shoppers, the quiet younger ones just plain polite. I thought of the immaculate meat packing room, where I used to pick up orders when I had the restaurant, the assembly line of Chinese workers in white jumpsuits and paper hats each performing their particular motion. Lee Esposito stood on the corner smoking cigarettes, stoic but heartbroken, watching his life and the life of his father and grandfather being hacked and burned and destroyed.
The legend goes that there is no such thing as a disgruntled employee at Esposito's. They are that fair and gracious. People make lifetime careers of standing behind their chrome and glass cases, wrapping meat in brown butcher paper. The kid who torched the store was a longtime employee who ended up with a heroin habit somewhere along the line. He'd been caught stealing and they kept him on. He was caught again and then again until he was finally let go. He ended up in jail on some charges and they rehired him when he was released. Then he was caught stealing again and they let him go again. Sometime thereafter, he used his knowledge of the place to burglarize it. He grabbed $4,000 then spilled some gasoline and lit it to cover his tracks. They found him several days later in his girlfriend's row house on Tree Street. His face was badly burned. I assume the money was shot up and gone by then. The damage to Esposito's was in the millions, including inventory, the retail store, the meat packing plant, the apartments and the fleet of trucks.
The morning after the fire, before he even slept, Lee started making plans to rebuild. The first course of business was to hang a banner above the charred doorway: Esposito's- Down But Not Out. Within six months the store was open again. All of the butchers and packers and drivers and countermen are back in their stations. Once again, the windows shine through the night with the neon silhouettes of a pig, a chicken, a steer and a lamb. As I labor to establish my business, the business of my father, to take it past the treacherous first two years and into the light, or into the black, rather, I can look across the street and imagine the mighty Esposito's in its infancy: a man with a slaughtered cow and a wife and a bunch of children to feed and clothe. I have seen them struggle, even at this stage in the game, and it helps me in my struggle, as I lug the boxes of books from the car and find the proper place on the shelves for them. Every small business is filled with drama, whether comedy or tragedy. There is blood and guts beneath it all.
So, once again and possibly forever, I am an Italian Market merchant. No matter that I am a suburban Jew of mixed Eastern European heritage or that I peddle books rather than onions. I have been down here for over twenty years. I came here as a young bride. My kids were born here. When I brought them home from the hospital, I took them over to Fante's to have them weighed on the coffee scale. Mariella and Alice would put them in a big metal bowl and weigh them for me. When I walk down the street, vendor after vendor greets me by name. Yo, Moll! They've all watched me grow up, really, as much as my neighbors on Prospect Avenue have. This is my street now. The street of artichokes. I hope I can make a good enough go of my business that my kids will pick up on it when I'm gone and maybe even pass it along to their kids. But not for nothing, they'll probably move to Jersey. What are you gonna do?
Molly Russakoff is Poetry Editor at The Independent. She owns Molly's Café and Bookstore at 1010 S. 9th Street.
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