SPECIALTY STORES IN THE 50’S

Went shopping the other day and started to think about the era before supermarkets. Back in the 50’s when I was growing up, there were no supermarkets.  We had specialty stores and street vendors; although at the time we didn’t realize they were “specialty” stores.  The street vendors started to fade out in the 50’s.  They were mostly prominent in the 40’s and before. There were fish markets, grocery stores, Pasticcerias (Italian Bakeries), bread stores, Italian salumeria and latticini stores, butcher stores and they even had just Pork Stores specializing in all kinds of sausage.  This is where you got the homemade soppressata, prosciutto and dry sausage.  They would hang them in the window and throughout the store.

These stores were located at the street level of the tenement buildings.  You could walk along the avenue and find any one of the above-mentioned stores.  Some of them with their wares displayed in front of the stores. In between the stores were the entrances to the tenement building apartments. The push carts were usually parked in the blocks where they had the apartment buildings with stoops outside. Nowadays they are called “Brownstones” and cost millions of dollars.   I guess you could say it was an all-year-round Farmer’s Market.  The great part about it was that you knew all of the shop or cart owners by name.  They were your neighbors, friends and some even family.

If it wasn’t sold in the local stores or on the push carts, there was a food truck that came around with other specialties. Food trucks are not something new; they were just revamped for this generation. Then there was the truck that came around to sharpen your knives.  I remember one truck that sold homemade pies.  They had shelves with strips of wood along the base at the bottom to prevent the pies from sliding and falling off.  When my mother saw the truck, she would give us money and tell us what kind of pie she wanted…most pies were $2 or $3.  I think that’s the last time I had a huckleberry pie. They were delicious.  It was in the late 50’s because I remember the food truck would stop at the corner of 115^th Street and First Avenue.  We moved to 115^th and First Avenue in 1955.  You can’t find huckleberries anywhere nowadays.  You have to go on line to buy huckleberries and you would have to pay around $20/lb. and they come frozen.

My mother used to do most of her shopping on Saturdays but did pick up fresh vegetables during the week.  When she shopped on Saturdays she would give the bags to me (I was around 5 or 6 years old) and I would run up the two flights of stairs to bring them to my sisters Ann and Rose to sort out.  They would also be cleaning the apartment. We lived on the second floor of a tenement building on First Avenue and 113^th Street.  Mom usually told my sisters what to cook for dinner every Saturday night from the shopping items I had brought up.  My sisters learned to cook when they were quite young and were like mothers to me because of the age difference.  Ann was 13 years older than me and Rose was 11 years older. One Saturday my mom forgot to tell my sisters what to cook and they made EVERYTHING.  When my mom came upstairs later for dinner, she took a look at the table with a week’s worth of food and couldn’t believe her eyes.  She told us after dinner was over that she was planning on yelling at both Ann and Rose if there was one scrap of food leftover.  My sisters dodged a bullet that night without even knowing it because we ate every last morsel on those plates.  My mother couldn’t say a word.  We were good eaters because we were taught if we didn’t like it, we didn’t eat so we learned real quick to like everything.

Supermarkets were just starting to evolve and I remember an A&P opening up on 115th Street just off Second Avenue in the late 50’s, but nothing could beat the camaraderie and family atmosphere of the neighborhood shops.  Store owners like Santarpia’s, Lombardi’s, Romano’s or Criscuolo’s calling you by your first name.  My mother would send me to the Lattacini store on 116^th Street right next to the bank for fresh mozzarella in the water.  For scamorza cheese she would send me to the Lattacini store on 115^th Street right off of First Avenue. Then there were the Italian bakeries… 117^th Street and First for the pasticotti, 120^th and First for the casatina (?) 116^th Street between First and Pleasant (DeRosa’s) for the sfogliatelli and Cincotti’s on 116^th Street on the Corner of Second Avenue for the cheesecake.

Those were the days.  When I write these stories, it brings me right back to that era.  Until next week…