Out in the Snow Chasing Stories

Seems like a better idea than shoveling

I’m slogging through the snow in Philadelphia in the hope that two stories pan out.

One is about a supermarket in Philadelphia’s most racially and economically diverse neighborhood. Founded in 1683, Germantown still retains vestiges of when it was an area of country estates. In the 19th century, wealthy families built what they called summer homes, but which everyone else would consider mansions, to avoid the city’s dusty heat and proclivity for yellow fever. Fine row homes built of the gray stone from the surrounding land filled in the side streets. A robust shopping square attracted residents from adjacent areas. Since then, the area’s prosperity has gone up and down with the tenor of the times—thriving for awhile, run down, burnt out or abandoned in following decades, gentrified and renewed later, an ever-revolving enclave for different immigrant groups. The IGA Chelten Market opened in 2016 and has become something of a bellwether for the community. It’s part of a large chain, but its aisles hold a wealth of ingredients and equipment necessary for cooking Caribbean, Asian, and Far East dishes that would not necessarily be found in IGA’s other stores. Supermarkets can make or break a neighborhood, especially in urban neighborhoods. Since it opened its doors, Chelten Market seems to have intentionally striven to respond to the needs of the neighborhood and become closely knitted to Germantown’s identity. I’m particularly interested to find out the role it plays in integrating the different immigrant groups, especially those who are coming in now from Southeast Asia and the Middle East, into their new homeland.

The second is about the history and transformation of corner bars in the working-class neighborhood where I grew up, a section of the city dominated by 19th-century woolen mills, a cherished canal that George Washington surveyed, narrow houses clinging to rocky hillsides, and rows of church steeples built by the different waves of immigrants who came to work in the mills. The bars that seemed to occupy nearly every corner near the mills and along side streets were never just places to grab a beer. They served as clubhouses, community centers, social service offices, relationship mediation hubs, places where the owner and his wife served homemade food and the back room was the site of family gatherings. The neighborhood is no longer working class. Gentrification began in my late teens as it generally does when artists move in, followed by the kind of people who adore old mills converted into fancy loft developments. The bars held on even as their old clientele were replaced by customers seeking authentic grit in what they thought of as dives. But a few of the bars still remain, and I want to see how they’re doing and what their owners think the future will hold. Probably, I’m also searching for what’s left of my childhood.

If it’s snowing or cold or gray outside your door or wishing, as we all are, for a moment of grace, bundle up in extra layers and blankets and brew some hot chocolate or a toddy.

I’ll see you on Tuesday.