PhillyHistory Blog

Growing up as a newsboy on the streets of San Francisco, Jack London got to know and love “the wide-open, all-male flavor of saloonlife.”

“I had no time to read. I was busy getting exercise and learning how to fight, busy learning forwardness, and brass and bluff. I had an imagination and a curiosity about all things that made me plastic. Not least among the things I was curious about was the saloon. And I was in and out of many a one. . . .”

“The saloon was the place of congregation. Men gathered to it as primitive men gathered about the fire of the squatting place or the fire at the mouth of the cave.”

“By way of the saloon I had escaped from the narrowness of woman’s influence into the wide free world of men. All ways led to the saloon [whose] doors were ever open. And always and everywhere I found saloons, on highway and byway, up narrow alleys and on busy thoroughfares, bright-lighted and cheerful, warm in winter and in summer dark and cool.”

“Yes, the saloon was a mighty fine place, and it was more than that. … The saloons are poor men’s clubs. Saloons are congregating places. We engaged to meet one another in saloons. We celebrated our good fortune or wept our grief in saloons. We got acquainted in saloons.”

“In the saloons, life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness. Here was something more than the common every-day where nothing happened. Here life was always very live, and, sometimes even lurid, when blows were struck, and blood was shed, and big policemen came shouldering in. Great moments, these, for me, my head filled with all the wild and valiant fighting of the gallant adventurers on sea and land. There were no big moments when I trudged along the street throwing my papers in at doors. But in the saloons, even the sots, stupefied, sprawling across the tables or in the sawdust, were objects of mystery and wonder.”

And more, the saloons were right. The city fathers sanctioned them and licensed them. They were not terrible places I heard boys deem them who lacked my opportunities to know. Terrible they might be, but then that only meant they were terribly wonderful, and it is the terribly wonderful that a boy desired to know. In the same way pirates, and shipwrecks, and battles were terrible; and what healthy boy wouldn’t give his immortal soul to participate in such affairs?”

“Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges, who names and faces I knew. They put the seal of social appeal on the saloon. They verified my own feeling of fascination in the saloon. They, too, must have found that there was something different, that something beyond, which I sensed and groped after. What it was, I did not know; yet there it must be, for there men focused like buzzing flies about a honey pot.”

In saloons, confirms Madelon Powers, “men defined themselves as men. They established standards of manly comportment and continuously reaffirmed their personal and group esteem by observing. . . standards. They sought out men of the same age cohort whose experiences and interests chronologically paralleled their own. . . . Single men, married men, migrating men whose families waited behind—all sought fellowship and solace from barmates in comparable situations. As regulars dealt collectively with these deeply personal concerns, they cultivated the kind of intimate, emotionally charged relationships associated with community.”

“Bolstering the regulars’ ethic of manliness was the ambience of the saloon itself. Indeed, nearly every feature of the saloon’s interior seemed designed to promote an aura of freewheeling masculinity. The air was redolent with beer fumes and cigar smoke. The bar’s footrail was itself ‘a symbol of masculinity emancipate’ . . . Wall decorations often included photographs of prizefighters such as John L. Sullivan . . . depictions of cockfights, horse races and battleships, Also popular with lithographs of buxom, scantily clad women who posed provocatively.  . . . Brass cuspidors stood within convenient spitting distance, with sawdust scattered about to accommodate lapses in marksmanship. For those disinclined to answer calls of nature, a few establishments even featured a urination trough on the floor running lengthwise along the bar counter, built on a slight tilt to facilitate flushing.

In the opening years of the 20th century, the urban saloon served to” reinforce feelings of uninhibited masculinity and gender solidarity among workingmen.” It was a place, as Hutchins Hapgood observed of McSorley’s Saloon in New York, where “no woman ever passed or passes the threshold.” A place where “workingmen . . . sit quietly for hours over one or two mugs of ale look as if they never thought of a woman. They are maturely reflecting in purely male ways and solemnly discoursing, untroubled by skirts or domesticity.”

[Sources: Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870-1920 (The University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jack London, John Barleycorn (1913); Hutchins Hapgood, “McSorley’s Saloon,” Harpers Weekly, Vol 58, October 25, 1913.]

“If you enjoy the finer things of life, good cheer and good times in a beautiful atmosphere—if you take pride in your home—the FormStone club room is for you,” read an advertisement in December 1949. “That ‘lost’ space in your cellar can become the loveliest room you ever saw, with a FormStone beauty treatment. A major home improvement that enlarges your home, increases its value and helps make home life beautiful. A club room or recreation room for adults, a playroom for the children, a television setting par excellence. Hand-sculptured by skilled craftsmen, in any design, with an special effects to suit your taste, arches, pilasters, bars, etc. Architectural ideas and estimate without charge or obligation.”

“FormStone is Foremost,” read another pitch a few months later. “It’s in a class by itself. Your FormStone Home is a work of art, every inch hand sculptured painstakingly by master-craftsmen. Guaranteed 20 years, it will actually last a lifetime. FormStone  is America’s favorite home beauty treatment…nationally proven… highly endorsed by more than 3,000 homeowners during the past 15 years. It’s the natural stone, carefully selected for color and durability, compounded with finest grade cement. FormStone improves with age! It mellows with weathering, remains forever beautiful, rugged, weatherproof…and insulating. Economical, too—initial cost is modest, and it’s the last; no upkeep, no repair, no painting. Applied over any surface, anywhere, exterior or interior—over shingles, weatherboard, brick, stucco, concrete or cinder block. … Your home deserves FormStone.”

Fake stone, or “simulated masonry” as preservation expert Ann Milkovich McKee calls it, “played a large role in the changing aesthetics of the American public begin­ning in the 1930s.” Perma-Stone, the earliest and best known “of the simulated masonries that could be applied directly to a building” originated in Columbus, Ohio in 1929. Other brands, we learn from The Old House Journal, “included Rostone, Tru-Stone, Fieldstone, Bermuda Stone, Modern Stone, Romanstone, Magnolia Stone, Dixie Stone, Silverstone.” And there was FormStone. Each “was applied in a manner similar to stucco, usually in multiple layers, to wire net or lath attached to existing exterior walls, then scored with simulated mortar joints to suggest individual stones. Adding to the illusion were often artful coloration and sometimes mica chips that would sparkle on a sunny day.”

“Form-Stone, is a man-made stone, a hand-sculpted, modern surface for building new homes or renewing old homes,” read the earliest Philadelphia advertisement from March 1947, a decade after Baltimorean Albert Knight patented the process. By then, it had been “tried and proven” by more than a thousand customers in the Baltimore-Washington area. Testimonials aimed to convince Philadelphians: “We are even more proud of our FormStone than we were the day it was finished,” said Joseph Biles. “It has lived up to expectations in every way. In fact, we are sure that it is becoming more beautiful with each passing year.”

“We were tired of worrying about regular repainting, of moisture penetration and dampness,” said a Mrs. Lake. “We wanted something permanent, something that would make your home beautiful and keep it that way. Formstone did just that for us.”

I can safely say that you have added at least twice the value of the improvements to the full value of my house” claimed Major Robb.

A self-described “choosy” restaurant owner declared he “selected FormStone to beautify [his] place. Only FormStone could give me exactly what I wanted: in design, color and effect.”

“We wanted a façade with dignity and beauty and we got it in FormStone,” said a pharmacist, adding the benefit of “everlasting weather protection and freedom from repairs.” A tavern owner considered “it one of the best deals I ever made.” And a car dealer claimed “it has actually attracted customers to our establishment. In the thirty three years we’ve been in business, we consider this the finest improvement made to our property…”

The “last word in lasting beauty.”

Americans carried on their love affair with fake façades until the waning decades of the 20th century. About then, John Waters of Pink Flamingo and Hairspray fame (never one to miss a trend in popular culture) produced a 30-minute video Little Castles: A Formstone Phenomenon.

In a 1998 documentary, Waters provided a nickname for the popular, pastel, sometimes sparkly façade cement long loved by Baltimoreans and Philadelphians alike:

He dubbed FormStone “the polyester of brick.”

[Sources: Advertisements from the Inquirer: March 23, 1947; December 4 1949; March 19, 1950 and March 26, 1950; Ann Milkovich McKee, “Stonewalling America Simulated Stone Products,” in Cultural Resource Management: Preserving the Recent Past (The National Park Service, 1995) vol. 18. no. 8;  and Paul K. Williams, “The Faux Stone Follies,” Old House Online, June 2003.]

“’Everybody’” belongs to the Philadelphia Racquet Club, proclaimed Nathaniel Burt more than half a century ago.  And by “’everybody’” Burt meant the subjects of his classic Perennial Philadelphians, the subtitle of which is our obvious tip off: “Anatomy of an American Aristocracy.

One might have expectations that their clubhouse, designed by Horace Trumbauer, the go-to architect for over-the-top client expectations (a recent monograph is titled American Splendor) would be something of an opulent, urban sports palace. After all, Trumbauer created crenelated “Grey Towers” for the sugar magnate William Welsh Harrison, the 110-room “Lynnewood Hall” for streetcar baron P. A. B.  Widener and the lavish”Whitemarsh Hall” for investment banker Edward T. Stotesbury. But when it came to making a statement at this 16^th Street sporting and eating refuge for old-money Philadelphia, Trumbauer chose the muted Georgian revival, which blended right in with old, original red-brick, white stoop Philadelphia.

Nothing on the façade telegraphed the fact that the clubhouse foreshadowed modernity (it was one of the city’s first reinforced concrete structures) or that its above grade swimming pool was among the world’s first. Nor did the building reveal that inside, members competed in “the sport of medieval French kings” on a “literal indoor reproduction of the original palace courtyard.” There was nothing else like it in the city, and only a few like it in the country, this court tennis court, “with all sorts of antique penthouses, windows at odd intervals.”

Court tennis only vaguely resembled the much more popular (and derivative) lawn tennis. By comparison, this court is “immense: 93 feet long by 31 feet wide… 15 feet longer and 4 feet wider than the standard lawn-tennis singles court.” The “crimson-trimmed net was two feet lower in the middle than at the ends.” Dimensions vary. England’s Hampton Court “is some 24 inches longer and 19 inches wider than the two courts at the New York Racquet Club.” (That’s right—New York has two.) In Britain, the “walls are rougher, which means that the ball will bounce off them at a steeper angle.”  The slope of the penthouses running along three of the walls can be different, although the window-like openings at odd intervals appear the same.

One way players score in this complicated game, is to hit the heavy, hand-sewn, lopsided ball into these holes at speeds approaching 150 miles per hour. Yes, the esoteric rules and hard-acquired skills take years to master.

The history and lore of the game is actually far more interesting  Word has it that the young Henry VIII brought the game to Hampton Court in 1530. “His second wife Anne Boleyn was said to be watching a game when she was arrested and the king was playing tennis when news was brought to him of her execution.”

“Shakespeare mentioned the game in six of his plays. … Chaucer, Erasmus, Edmund Spenser, Rabelais, Pepys, Gower, Chapman, Rousseau, Ben Jonson, John Locke, Montaigne, and Galsworthy are among the men of letters who made mention of tennis.”

“Proper tennis” had been played by royals and wannabes for about three-quarters of a millennium before it arrived on American shores. Whether it first landed in Boston in 1876 or New York in 1890 or Chicago in 1893 is a matter of prideful debate. But one thing, pointed out by Burt, seemed clear: the game was imported “during the Gilded Age as a piece of extremely conspicuous consumption.”

And for the longest time, and perhaps still today, the Philadelphia version of the game is a “preserve of the aristocracy”—albeit inconspicuously as possible.

[Sources: Nathaniel Burt The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999; originally published in 1963); Sandra L. Tatman, Horace Trumbauer (Philadelphia Architects and Buildings; The Athenaeum of Philadelphia); Allison Danzig, The Royal & Ancient Game of Tennis: A Short History; Robert W. Stock, “The Courtliest Tennis Game of Them All, The New York Times, March 6, 1983; James Zug, Introduction to Court Tennis, A Guide to Tennis.]

Sergeant Fred Lloyd became an instant American wartime legend in September 1918, when he singlehandedly cleared an entire German-occupied village by walking the streets “pumping and firing” an army-issue, 12-gauge, Winchester Model 97 shotgun.

Stateside, the shotgun had been the firearm of choice for game hunting. On the battlefields of World War I, it earned the nickname “trench sweeper.” Germans considered the weapon so lethal they filed a diplomatic protest, charging it caused “unnecessary suffering,” that its use violated the Hague Convention.

After the war, American police put the shotgun to work on city streets, claiming it outperformed the submachine gun.

Philadelphia police had already adopted the motorcycle as a crime fighting tool. In 1915, the department argued that a “Flying Squadron” of 200 officers on motorcycles “would be equivalent to 1,000 footmen …more effective than men on horseback” and less costly. When they added shotgun-wielding sharpshooters in sidecars to the mix, urban policing would take an aggressive turn.

“A new era in the development of the Philadelphia Police forces is scheduled to begin today,” reported Richard J. Beamish in the Inquirer of December 23, 1920. “Philadelphia’s Christmas presents for motor bandits are ready: 150 armed motorcycles, most of them with sidecars, a stack of sawed-off shotguns, each pumping six shells of buck shot in rapid succession. A battalion of intensively trained motorcycle and automobile drivers whose daring and sharpshooting will make them deadly foes to bandits.” A handpicked, photogenic “squad of ‘bandit hunters’” would overcome getaway cars going as fast as 80 miles per hour. With their “sawed-offs,” police were “guaranteed to blow the tire from a motor car or end the career of a fugitive robber.”

For sheer effectiveness, but also for the optics of power, shotguns became the go-to weapon. In 1954, Police Commissioner Gibbons’ “shotgun squad” aimed “a stepped-up war on violent crimes, especially those committed by ‘hop-heads,’” referring to drug users. Every squad car in the detective division had at least two men with sawed-off shot guns, not stowed away, but on full display.

“Shotgun Squads Patrol the Streets” read the headline.

It was only a matter of time before the shotgun became a symbol of police power in a racially divided city.

According to the The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, the police department, then 95 percent white, “fielded ‘shotgun squads’ of officers patrolling in cars with sawed-off shotguns leaning out the windows in a show of force” in African-American neighborhoods. On repeated occasions, in the 1950s, Police Commissioner Thomas J. Gibbons “ordered mass arrests of hundreds of young black men.”

“Of the thirty-two people shot and killed by police between 1950 and 1960, twenty-eight—87.5 percent—were black, even though blacks made up 22 percent of the city population.”

As a symbol of power, the shotgun would be brought by police and brought up by protestors. During the 1964 campaign for the integration of Girard College marchers “announced their readiness to physically resist police violence,” wrote Matthew J. Countryman in Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. “To the tune of ‘We Shall Overcome,’ the protesters sang ‘We Shall Overrun.’ One favorite chant promised violent revenge on the police: ‘Jingle Bells / shotgun shells / Freedom all the way / Oh, what fun it is / To blow a bluecoat man away.’ Another began ‘Cecil’s got a shotgun,’” referring to leader of the protests, civil rights activist and later City Councilman, Cecil B. Moore.

Two years later, police Commissioner Frank Rizzo “organized four squads of shotgun-toting cops to raid offices and an apartment associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) heavily armed police backed by 1000 uniformed officers raided four buildings.”

Rizzo’s men would arrive in bulletproof vests carrying sawed-off shotguns.

(Sources: Tom Laemlein, “The Trouble with Trench Guns,” The American Rifleman, January 23, 2018;  Glenn H. Utter Guns and Contemporary Society: The Past, Present, and Future of Firearms and Firearm Policy (ABC-CLIO, December 1, 2015); “’Flying Squadron’” is Potter’s Plan,” The Inquirer, March 5, 1915;  “New Police Plan Before Council’s Committee Today,” by Richard J. Beamish, The Inquirer, December 1, 1920; “Bureau of Police Ready for Bandits,” The Inquirer, December 23, 1920; “Philadelphia’s ‘Bandit Chasers’ and their ‘sawed-offs,’” The Inquirer, August 8, 1922; “City’s War on Crime Calls for Frontal Attack,” The Inquirer, September 20, 1954; “Gibbons Places Top Police on 24-Hour Crime Vigil – Shotgun Squads Patrol the Streets,” The Inquirer, November 21, 1954; Matthew J. Countryman, Up South:  Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jake Blumbgart, “The Brutal Legacy of Frank Rizzo, the Most Notorious Cop in Philadelphia History,”  Vice.com, October 22, 2015.)

In his “Midnight Soliloquy in the Market House of Philadelphia,” Philip Freneau observed:

The market house, like the grave, is a place of perfect equality. None think of themselves too mighty to be seen here, nor are there any so mean as to be excluded. Here you may see (at the proper hour) the whig and the tory – the Churchman and the Quaker – the Methodist and the Presbyterian—the moderate man and the violent—the timorous and the brave—the modest and the impudent—the chaste and the lewd, the philosopher and the simpleton – the blooming lass of fifteen, and the withered matron of sixty—the man worth two pence, and he of a hundred thousand pounds—the huxter with a paper of pins, and the merchant who deals in the produce of both the Indies—the silly politician who has schemed and written himself blind for the service of his country, and the author who wears a fine coat, and is paid to profusion for writing nothing at all!

That was 1782. More than a century and a quarter later, expressions of democratic market life continued to thrive in Philadelphia.

“The curbstone market was a busy scene this morning. Well-gowned women rubbed elbows with the poor housewife in shawl and wrapper, and many of the former learned a few points from the poor woman’s method of buying. While there are no marble counters and spotlessly clad attendants, the curb merchants are dressed for work in hand, and are courteous, too, for they want the same customers to come back again and bring their neighbors.”

Apparently, the customer and the neighbors were returning in Philadelphia, and everywhere else. The curbstone market had evolved into the most universal, democratic food distribution institution.

“Many cities in America and Europe have set aside streets for open air or curbstone markets,” wrote Clyde Lyndon King in 1913. “Vienna has 40 such open markets; Antwerp, 19. The rental for wagon space, as a rule is nominal…whether in Atchison, Kansas, San Antonio, Texas, [or in] Buffalo, New York.” In Cleveland, Ohio, “two and a half miles of streets…are lined by 1300 farmers and 400 hucksters. Both Baltimore and Montreal attract 1500 wagons each market day by their curbstone markets.”

“The pushcart, the vender’s wagon and the open air farmers’ markets offer the cheapest possible store at adaptable locations, and thus should give avenues for food distribution at minimum costs. While there can be no doubt that the covered market will be the better in the long run, yet the open air curbstone market offers a good temporary method of attracting farmers and of giving consumers an opportunity to buy directly.”

The promise of “’producer to consumer’ has always had an alluring sound, wrote an editor of the Inquirer in 1918, “but somehow it has never been effected in a practical and workable manner.”

“Multiply the Curb Markets,” read another editorial. “We have long talked of the advantages of the from ‘farms to table’ idea, and now is the time to prove that it is something more than a beautiful theory.”

All the more appealing when the cost of food supplies at the market halls grew to 50 percent of a workingperson’s paycheck. As food costs rose, editors of the Evening Ledger assigned a reporter to conduct a comparison between “the style and convenience” of shopping in the market halls and the convenience of the curbstone market.

Consider the head of cabbage, urged the report. It may be “bought for five cents, if a woman picks it up from a basket and carries it home.” But the price “is greatly increased … if it is sent home in the dealer’s fancy automobile and delivered in a fancy wooden box by a uniformed messenger.” In order “to economize and get down to simplicity in buying,” the shopper “cannot find a better place than the curbstone market. … Here can be found everything in the produce line, devoid of frills, at low prices.”

During the First World War the situation became even more dire for “the salaried man whose pay envelope is no larger, but whose expenses have been soaring skyward for several years. The curbstone market should be a blessing to such persons and the [curbstone market] experiment will be watched with unusual interest.”

“Curbstone Market Solves Cost of Living Problem” read the headline featuring the reporter’s comparison of prices with those at the Reading Terminal market. The reporter found 17 foods where the shopper “could save $1.20 by patronizing the curbstone market instead of the Terminal Market. Deducting 10 cents for carfare for those who live beyond walking distance from the curbstone market the saving would be $1.10 on each trip…” Assuming three marketing trips per week, the savings would be $3.30 every week, significant savings for families dependent on factory worker wages of $11 per week.

During the First World War the situation became even more dire for “the salaried man whose pay envelope is no larger, but whose expenses have been soaring skyward for several years. The curbstone market should be a blessing to such persons and the [curbstone market] experiment will be watched with unusual interest.”

[Sources: Clyde Lyndon King, Municipal Markets, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 50, Reducing the Cost of Food Distribution (Nov., 1913), pp. 102-117; Candice L. Harrison, The Contest of Exchange: Space, Power, and Politics in Philadelphia’s Public Markets, 1770-1859 (Dissertation in History, Emory University, 2008) PDF; “Curbstone Market Solves Cost of Living Problem,” The Evening Ledger [Philadelphia] October 9, 1914; “Support the Curbstone Markets” Inquirer, August 23, 1918; “Multiply the Curb Markets, Inquirer, September 4, 1918; “More Curb Markets May be Founded,” Inquirer, May 16, 1919.]

The corner store.

Ahem. Let me start again.

The amazing, agile, ubiquitous corner store! We’re been thinking about them for a couple of posts now: It’s 1901: Time to go Grocery Shopping in North Philadelphia and Grocery Chains and the Origins of Philadelphia’s Food Deserts. Regular readers know that, once upon a time, there were thousands of them in Philadelphia: grocery stores, butcher shops, barber shops, pharmacies, variety stores, luncheonettes, book stores, record shops and more. The corner store was the glue that held the city’s neighborhoods together.

In her thesis “Philadelphia Corner Stores: Their History, Use, and Preservation” Lynn Miriam Alpert pointed out how this vernacular urban genre stands “in stark contrast to the concentrations of commercial structures in shopping districts,” and yet is still part and parcel of the city’s rowhouse neighborhoods. Alpert relays that the corner store played an essential role in the employment of women. (In San Francisco at the start of the 20^th century, “ninety percent of female grocers lived at the same address as their stores, allowing them to remain at home while also earning a living.”) And we learn that despite the fact that “Philadelphia’s historic row house neighborhoods have undergone intense changes since their creation,” corner stores still play “an active role in the vibrance and vitality” of their communities. They served as economic drivers.

Indeed. The Bodega Association of the United States confirms that in 2002 alone, the small grocery stores in New York City “generated annual sales of over $7 billion and provided over 65,000 jobs with an annual payroll estimated at $750 million.” And when undocumented workers are factored in, “the actual number of jobs and the aggregate payroll may be closer to twice the official figures.”

When we consider the story of immigration in urban America, the corner store was and remains an essential and compelling feature in the community. According to Fernando Mateo, the neighborhood store faced the onslaught of competition brought on by the supermarket, survived, and to this day serves as a gathering spot, a place “where people get together and go over their daily news, and…become part of their communities.”

The story of the modest corner store in Philadelphia is part and parcel of a robust, inclusive narrative. Yet, with all of our collective interest in place, in food, in identity and in the life and character of our communities, there is no corner store museum.

Maybe it’s time to change that.

I mean, what better way would there be to connect community and memory?

1). Southwest Corner or Gratz and York Streets, Ed Bonnem Prime Meats, May 4, 1905

2). Southwest Corner 7th and Porter Streets, April 6, 1960

3.) Northwest Corner, 17th Street and Washington Avenue, February 7, 1917

4.) Southwest Corner, 25th and Kimball Streets, May 3, 1916

5.) Northeast Corner, Cumberland and Marshall Streets, La Vencedora Groceries, November 9, 1960

6.)  Trenton and Susquehanna Avenues, May 11, 1900

7.) Kimball Street and Grays Ferry Avenue, July 30, 1924

8.) 47th Street and Woodland Avenue, Luncheonette, March 28, 1951

9.) 43rd and Pine Streets. The Great Atlantic Pacific Tea Company, August 21, 1924

10.) Southeast Corner of Spruce and Camac Streets, Camac Food Market, March 2, 1959

11.) Northwest Corner, 8th and Moore Streets. Milano’s Groceries, November 25, 1949

12.) Southeast Corner of Thompson and Lefevre Streets, July 14, 1930

In the 1920s, the average working-class family spent about one-third of its budget on groceries. “Most households spent more to put dinner on the table than for their rent or their mortgage.”

And where “food was hugely expensive, relative to wages” neighborhood grocery stores delivered “only moderate amounts of nutrition” according to Marc Levinson. “Only token stocks of fresh fruits and vegetables” were offered. “Fresh fish and poultry were rarities.”

“The poorest third of American households consumed a sorely inadequate daily intake of vitamins and minerals, because there was little of either in the food that their neighborhood shops had for sale.”

And yet grocery stores were everywhere—on nearly every corner.

Last time we learned that by 1911, Philadelphia had more than 5,700 grocery stores, or one for every fifty-four families. By 1929, a national survey documented exactly how widespread the corner grocery actually was. There were 585,980 of them across the United States, “one for every fifty-one American families.”

Behind their wooden counters and “shelves of food …tended by store managers in dark vests, male store clerks in white aprons, and female clerks wearing long skirts and white blouses” was a world where the corporate managers determined what Americans would have to eat and from whom they purchased it. More and more, this tended to be from one or another of the expanding grocery chain stores.

Not that an independent grocer couldn’t make it. “Careful, intelligent grocers with fair credit can and do make good profits if conditions are at all favorable,” economist E. M. Patterson assured readers in 1911. Butter and eggs comprised “about 36 percent of the grocer’s total sales and provided only 10 per cent profit. Flour yielded 16 percent “but ham, bacon and lard less than 5 per cent.” Thing was, the majority of sales provided “gross profit of only about 9 percent” when 15 to 20 percent was needed to stay afloat.

Still, an independent grocer, no matter how dedicated or talented, couldn’t manage their way out of a discount situation created by the chains.  As A & P’s John A. Hartford would later put it: “We would rather sell 200 pounds of butter at 1 cent profit than 100 pounds at 2 cents profit.” It might be “good for consumers, it was bad for the hundreds of thousands of retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers who needed high food prices in order to make a living.”

According to Levinson, independent grocers “were being trampled in the price and premium wars” led by the big chains.

At the start of the 20^th century, the Great Atlantic & Pacific (later A & P) “opened an average of one store every two weeks and developed a network of more than 5,000 wagon routes for “commissioned salespeople driving Great Atlantic & Pacific horse carts” throughout much of the United States.

This market dominance paved the way for the rise of the supermarket after World War II. “While consumer spending on food rose by half between 1945 and 1948, A&P’s sales doubled and its profits trebled. In 1945, chains accounted for 31 percent of grocery sales. Just two years later, their share was 37 percent.”

“The number of supermarkets nationwide, around two thousand in 1941, hit fifty-six hundred in 1948” and the supermarket controlled “one-quarter of all grocery sales.”

The supermarket “was a national phenomenon.” But more to the detriment of places like Philadelphia, “it was a suburban phenomenon.” The city’s aging neighborhoods, with their failed and failing corner grocery stores, were transformed into food deserts.

[Sources: Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); E. M. Patterson, “The Cost of Distributing Groceries,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 50, (Nov., 1913), pp. 74-82.]