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Showing posts with label "But where do you shop?". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "But where do you shop?". Show all posts
Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers. Remember there's only a few more days to enter and win a huge print of "Everything is Going to be Alright."
This post is part of my ongoing response to lazy journalists like Mr. Hansen who love to echo silly hyperbole because it's so shocking (whether or not it's actually true). This is just a humble post about how we manage not to starve to death here in the city of Detroit despite a lack of national chains. "But where do you shop?!" is a question I get all the time when people find out we're raising a family in Detroit. It's a question I remember asking myself back in the late 90s when I first started coming here to visit a house full of artists, musicians, and urban gardeners that my friend knew well. I remembered mentioning some hand-wringing magazine article I'd read about "food deserts." But of course what I really wondered was, How far do you have to drive to get to the Kroger? This presumes, of course, that national chains are the best place to buy groceries. Over the last few years I've learned that's not at all true, and sometimes it's a good thing that Detroit doesn't have any large chain supermarkets. Honey Bee Market La Colmena is a good example why.
A few days after we moved into our current house, some kindly neighbors brought over a 64 oz container of fresh salsa and bag of house-made tortilla chips from Honey Bee Market La Colmena. From the first bite, we were hooked. I sat down the other day with Ken Koehler and his wife Tammy Alfaro-Koehler outside their Detroit grocery store, and they cracked open a tub of the same fresh salsa and a bag of their chips while we chatted about the history of the store. It felt just right.
[This is a long post with a lot of photos, so click to continue reading on a separate page]
I never gave much thought to what was on the second floor of R. Hirt Jr., right above the spot where I've ordered dozens of pounds of cheese, cured meats, bacon, eggs, butter, and paid for many hundreds of gallons of milk over the years. Hirt feels like an old-fashioned store because it actually is one: the layout seems not to have changed much in more than a century that it's spent at this location. But I don't have a true sense of this history until retail manager Judy Jagenow takes me on a tour upstairs, past the "employees only" sign and about a hundred years into the past. "This is the apartment where the original Hirt family lived," she says, leading me through rooms with faded and peeling Victorian wallpaper that's been stuck there since 1890 when the building was built.
Looking past the boxes of imported olive oil and pasta, you can see what is left of the apartment where Rudolph Hirt, a Swiss immigrant, and his wife Anna raised seven children and built one of the few Detroit businesses that would survive from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first.
There are places where the plaster is peeling away and latticework is visible beneath. There is a hard-earned, honest patina to the place. Seven children were raised here. You almost expect to see notches marking their growth carved at varying heights along the original moldings that remain around the doorways; the moldings remain even around the windows that once marked the rear of the old store but now sit within an interior wall of a building extended well beyond its original shallow footprint.
"We ripped out a drop ceiling only to find another drop ceiling," Judy tells me. "When we ripped that one out we found the original tin ceiling. It had been singed by smoke from a fire back in the early days. The story goes that while he was escaping the fire, Mr. Hirt grabbed what he thought was one of the babies but it turned out just to be blankets, so he rushed back in and saved her. Both were burned, but she lived to an old age."
This story of this family living above their store appeals to me, though such an arrangement was not at all uncommon for the time. The Hirt building lies just west of a number of slaughterhouses; I've read that in the early days, livestock that hadn't been killed were kept in pens on the roofs of the buildings. There was once an Italian grocer next door (that building burned down in the 1980s) and a German dancehall on the other side. It is hard to imagine such a time in our city, and the fact that this apartment survives makes it all seem so much more real. Judy tells me that her grandfather would take the same route she does to work, driving his cattle from his farm in Mt. Clemens all the way down Gratiot Avenue in the days when the Hirt building was still new. The Hirt family's business traces its origins back even further than the building itself, to 1887 when Rudolph invested his life savings in a stall that sold butter, eggs, and dairy products at Detroit's central market. The stall proved lucrative enough that the dairy merchant built the current ornate red-brick Romanesque building for a new store with his own name carved into the stone at its gable. "R. HIRT JR."
"There was no R. Hirt Senior," Judy tells me. "There was another, unrelated R. Hirt in town so he just added the 'Junior' to distinguish himself for the postman." 122 years later, there is only one Hirt in Detroit (and it's this store, not a man). This store still draws in crowds of people from the suburbs every Saturday. I shop there during the week, usually on Thursday morning after the truck arrives from Calder Dairy with all the sorts of things Rudolph Hirt would have sold at his original market stall: farm fresh eggs, freshly-churned butter, sour cream, cottage cheese, and (starting in late October) egg nog. I come in with a bag full of empty bottles and exchange them for cold ones with white-caps filled with natural milk (pasteurized, but not homogenized). During the week, the lines are less hectic than on market Saturdays and it gives me a chance to talk to and get to know nearly everyone who works there. They've watched my kids grow up and they know exactly what kind of cheese to give them when we come in to keep them busy while I order.
If there's anything Hirt is known for, it's cheese. And if you want some, the minimum cut is a pound.
At the cheese counter there's a 7-page list with more than 300 varieties from all over the world. Hirt's cracker department is practically larger than all of Murray's Cheese Shop in Greenwich Village (Hirt has also been around half a century longer than New York's oldest cheesemonger). As the major cheese wholesaler in Southeast Michigan, Hirt's retail store gives walk-in customers access to the same cheese selection as the restaurants and caterers who buy cheese by the 10-pound wheel. And at the counter you can ask for samples of nearly any cheese, domestic or imported. I once made the mistake of standing in line behind a French couple who sampled several dozen cheeses from their native land, grunting to each other about the fruity aftertaste of the Pavé d'Oc or arguing whether the Camembert was too ripe before placing a sizable order. The store even has a francophone employee for the Saturday rush.
All this talk of cheese may seem like this is only a place for cheese snobs. But Hirt is refreshingly unpretentious. After cheese, their next largest department is wicker. Seriously: the third floor is stocked floor-to-ceiling with wicker baskets.
They even rent the old German dancehall from the building owner next door to store their excess wicker:
It's pretty hard to be a pretentious wickermonger, no matter how many stinky cheeses you sell. Nobody here looks down their nose at you if you want a pound of colby-jack or if you only want the domestic Parmesan (trust me, I know). I asked Judy if any of the cheesecutters are total cheese snobs, and she struggled to think of anyone who'd fit that description. "Not really," she said. "Cheryl knows the most about cheese, she's a real expert. But she doesn't buy a whole lot. Nobody buys all that much of it." I imagine spending your days cutting the cheese doesn't leave you with much if an appetite for it. Cheryl's been working here since high school (her mom was a cashier here before she was). Judy and Jan have been here 23 years. One of the ladies who works up in baskets has been there 21 years. "We do get some turnover," Judy says when I commend such loyalty. "You have to not mind working with cheese." The store is still owned and run by members of the third and fourth generations of the Hirt family, mostly overseeing the warehouse operations and wholesale business.
But it's not just dairy products. Every day, fresh baked breads are delivered to the front door. At the cheese counter you can also get pâtés, cured meats, sausages, jerky, ham, liverwurst, salami and other cold cuts, pickles, tofu, and sliced slab bacon. The rest of the store features specialty goods for which the company acts as a regional wholesaler. Without a grocery store in our neighborhood, we just go to Hirt. You won't find any products distributed by PepsiCo. Nestle, General Mills, Kellogg Co., Sara Lee, Campbell Soup Co. or Kraft Foods here (though Hirt was the first Michigan distributor of Kraft cheeses back in the 1930s). Though it's technically a specialty store, the prices aren't crazy. Those big conglomerates' products are more expensive at the independent "ghetto markets" throughout Detroit than they are at suburban bog boxes because independent retailers can't buy in the volume necessary to make prices competitive. Hirt doesn't try to compete with the big boxes, but instead buys unique and desirable products in great volumes to wholesale for other retailers in the region (and they have a huge warehouse just down the road or that purpose).
They focus on imported and locally-produced goods, but I can go there with a recipe and get just about everything I need, from beef stock to soba noodles; dried cherries to gourmet vinegars; water chestnuts to dried spices; gourmet coffees and teas. It's not one-stop shopping, but it's a surprisingly convenient and high-quality replacement. It's a frugal yuppie localvore's dream, and it's within walking distance of my front door.
Every trip to Hirt usually involves some bribery. About a year after we started shopping there, we discovered that in addition to wicker, the third floor has a toy department, and my kids love picking through the bins of 50 cent toys that make great gift bag stuffers.
You won't find Mattel or Hasbro or licensed Dora or Disney stuff here. Most of the toys are well suited for imaginative play (this is where we stock up on pirate supplies), many are old-fashioned classics, and some of them are even American-made.
It's one of the best toy selections in the metro area and you wouldn't even know it's there. The third floor also stocks Pewabic Pottery, Michigan-made goods and souvenirs, jewelry and tons of handcrafted holiday decorations. To get upstairs you can hitch a ride on the old-school rope freight elevator or take the century's-old stairs.
When you get to the top floor, you can catch a glimpse of why the floorboards have put up with more than a century's worth of traffic so well: the planks are actually arranged vertically:
And what I love most about Hirt are its quirks. The cheesecutter writes down the weight and price per pound your cheese on an old-fashioned bill-of-lading but she doesn't touch your money; she bags or boxes it up while you bring the bill over to the old cashier window, where another employee punches a million buttons on some old-fangled counting machine and writes down the price of each cut of cheese or meat and then adds up the total. Unless you pay with a credit card, there doesn't need to be a microchip or electrode involved in the transaction. You can tell the tourists from the locals by how confused they get checking out.
My mom was recently with me during a trip to Hirt, and she was amazed by my interactions with the staff (who knew her grandchildren so well) and our ability to buy so much of what we needed in such a strange, old-fashioned space. It was a few days before Halloween, and David Devries, the great-grandson of Rudolph Hirt---a busy man who's often buzzing around taking care of business at the front of the store---stopped to hand all kinds of Halloween decorations over to my daughter who was so excited about them. "That's a dollar," he said (about a $9.00 witch). "For you, that's a dollar."
I feel so fortunate to be able to give my kids the experience of shopping like this. This is how everyone shopped once. We all knew the person behind the counter well enough that they could quiet your child down with a sliver of mild cheddar slid across the counter on a piece of wax paper. It may be cheaper to shop at the big box stores (where some have eliminated checkers in certain aisles, replacing them with bumbling computers). The jars of pasta sauce at the Costco might be bigger. But you certainly don't get as much.
I bug Richie Crabb for about a week to talk to me about his hardware store for my "blog." I'd assumed it would be easy: I'd take a few pictures, scrawl out a few stories, and be out of his hair in twenty minutes tops. But every time I come in he's shooting the shit with somebody else and I don't want to interrupt. As I wait for him, lingering in the aisles and watching the employees helping customers I realize that Busy Bee Hardware on the corner of Gratiot and Russell in Detroit really is busy. I've always felt like I was the only customer there, but only because that's how they've always treated me. A steady stream of customers comes in and each of them gets the same friendly treatment. That conversation about fishing started because someone had a question about halogen light bulbs. The guy who needed some rope thimbles ends up talking about his dogs. Conversation is more the nuts and bolts of hardware retail than actual nuts and bolts. The hardware salesman must help solve problems he cannot see; he is a handyman of hypotheses; a surgeon who diagnoses from a distance, sells you the right scalpel and sends you on your way. The hardware salesman translates your need for a thingamadoodle or a whatsamajigger into something you carry away in a brown paper bag; and if you are a professional he must speak your jargon too.
This is why mom & pop hardware stores have the appeal that they do. It's just not the same asking some guy in an orange smock how to snake a drain that your kid shoved his toothbrush down. I once had an associate at Lowe's claim he couldn't tell me whether the 6#16 to 2#10 gauge wire connectors in my hand were the right size for a simple rewiring project. "If your house burns down, you might sue," he told me before I walked out frustrated and empty-handed. At Busy Bee, our neighborhood hardware store, that would never happen. There are two knowledgeable and helpful employees on the floor (neither is related to the owners but that doesn't mean they aren't family: Ted has been with them for fourteen years and Roy's been there since 1984). Ted once walked me through a hack to rewire a light switch so my formerly outlet-only pendant lamp would be properly grounded, and he's never once mentioned concern about litigation.
While I wait with my notebook, Roy opens the door for a man in a wheelchair who needs a key made. An elderly woman needs a new rubber stopper for one leg of her walker (75 cents) and Ted treats her like she's a Hollywood starlet in a Rodeo Drive boutique. She puts down a few more dollars in layaway towards the crock pot they're holding for her behind the counter. Another woman comes in to exchange some jigsaw puzzles from the big pile right by the door. These people know and care about their customers. Some regulars remember shopping there with parents and grandparents, and many have fond memories of the owners' parents who ran the store before them. Busy Bee is a bulwark against the forces threatening to destroy this community. It is a place where everyone who walks in the door is treated with the respect that a human being deserves.
Sandy Novak, Richie's "much younger" sister, is a natural storyteller and the store historian. She tells me Busy Bee traces its origins to 1918, when Julian Berkovitz opened a mercantile to cater to the farmers bringing their goods to sell in Eastern Market, recognizing that many of them stayed overnight in nearby hotels and most of them had wads of cash from their market sales. Busy Bee helped them lighten their wallets and fill their empty wagons with the things they needed: hardware, appliances, tools, housewares, toys, tack and harnesses (they even outfitted the Detroit Police Department's mounted patrol). When the Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town, they would visit Busy Bee for repairs, giving rise to the store's motto (still printed on stationary today): Everything from a mouse trap. . . to a tame elephant. Detroit's own Ferry Seed Co. supplied seeds for the farmers. The original seed counter and signage are there today, and the store still sells seeds and a complete line of gardening and canning supplies to Detroit's urban farmers and growers:
Sandy shows me a photo of the interior from 1924. The floorboards are the same, creaky and faded now after nearly a century of wear. The ceiling above us today is the same ceiling above her grandfather Herbert Crabb, the man who befriended Berkovitz's son-in-law in the trenches of World War I and came back to work in his store. Herbert's son Raymond and his wife Gwendolyn (Sandy and Richie's parents) took over the business in the 1940s and ran it until the eighties.
In the 1960s, the neighborhood of houses south of the store was torn down in the fit of urban renewal that built the apartments buildings and townhouses in our neighborhood today. "People in apartments don't need hardware stores like people who own houses," Sandy says, but the business made it through Detroit's most turbulent years because of her father's astute decision to buy the old washtub factory across the street and use it to store rock salt to supply regional businesses during the winter months. Every August, thirty-five semi truck loads of salt were delivered to the warehouse along with ten trucks of calcium chloride, and that supply would turn over 2-3 times every winter. Sandy estimates that on a good year they'd sell 135 semi trucks worth, and that's how rock salt saved their store. "It's awful to say, but the worse a winter was, the better we'd do." For decades, Busy Bee was one of the major salt wholesalers and retailers in southeast Michigan.
Richie Crabb has a bad back that bore more than a few 50-lb bags of salt in its day. He grew up in this store, and in the 1980s he took it over with his sister, the third generation of their family to run it, and you can find him there nearly every day, usually watching over the store from his seat above the giant chest of drawers filled with hose clamps and casters and couplings, surrounded by order forms, inventory lists, Matryoshka school photos of his two sons, a 386-IBM with a dysfunctional dot-matrix printer. He fills out forms the old-fashioned way: by hand. Whenever I walk in the door with my kids, I hear him shout from across the store: "There they are! How are the kids today?"
Today he finally sees me and smiles because he remembers he's promised me stories. I follow him up the century-old stairs and he shows me the second floor, filled to the rafters with vintage, deadstock hardware. There's a room of mid-century ductwork and shelves of dishware stretching to the far wall. There are antique cast-iron stoves and turn-of-the-century safes and early hot water heaters and drawer after drawer of unbelievable treasures: antique bike hardware, ice skate blades from the 1920s that you'd attach to your shoes, glass Thermos inserts, elaborate stove dampers. Richie takes me around for nearly an hour showing me each treasure with the excitement of a museum curator.
"This is where we played as kids," he says, "And where our kids played. Things weren't like they are nowadays. Back then you brought your kids with you to work." The kids of all the family businesses in Eastern Market would hang out here, he says. "We could watch them kill chickens down at Capitol, or hang out here. The boys liked it here because they could build things." Many of the store owners from around the market were old friends, and gathered often to play cards.
The store boasts the only rope-operated elevator in the city. Sandy tells me that at the bottom of the shaft there was a tunnel connected to the basement of the building next door, which was a maze of dead-end hallways and doors that opened on to brick walls. They speculate there was a prohibition-era distillery down there, and the tunnel and a secret walkway over the alley connecting the two buildings allowed the bootleggers to escape into the store and pretend to be shoppers if there was a police raid. Sandy suspects old Julius Berkovitz had some connection to the infamous Purple Gang, and shows me an old photo of the gangsters:
There are probably plenty of colorful stories collected over so many decades of running a store in such a rough town, but to their credit Richie and Sandy never once mention any crime other than bootlegging. When I ask about any crazy stories Richie says, "You mean like the guy who bought some ammo, shot himself in our vestibule and called to thank us for saving his life the next day?" Yeah, I say, like that. "Oh, there's lots of stories like that."
Busy Bee sells more than just hardware. There are used paperbacks, 25-cent coffee mugs, kitchen utensils and appliances, cleaning supplies, candy, Better Made potato chips. It's still something of the general mercantile it was when it opened in 1918. It's a "vernacular" shopping experience suited to the needs of a community with few other places to shop. There are very few things you might need around the house that you can't get here.
Over the years that I've shopped here, I've noticed that the prices are probably lower than they should be. I've even compared prices on certain items to the prices at suburban big boxes and in every case this little corner hardware store's prices were lower. Part of that, of course, is because it serves a population that simply can't afford inflated prices. But there's something else: I've heard Richie say, "If we were only doing this to make a profit, we'd have stopped a long time ago." They do put some of the vintage stuff on eBay. They still move some salt in the winter. But it is clear they're in here every day for reasons other than money. As Jonathan Richman sings, "this was love." Then I hear Richie say something else: "If we close up shop, this will just be another empty storefront, just another dead corner in Detroit." The store is known for the bright yellow murals on its exterior: busy worker bees holding tools and bumbling around, making a corner that could be dead buzz with life instead.
Sandy's husband Mike operates a lock shop in the back of the store, and eventually they want to retire up north. Richie's boys, both in school, work in the store on weekends but have their own dreams and don't want to take over the business. Sandy urges me to write something about how eventually they want to sell it to a family who'll run Busy Bee in the same spirit their family has for all these years. "Maybe," she says, "Someone will read what you write and say 'Hey, that doesn't sound so bad.'"
"If I can even come close to conveying how important this place is," I say, "Plenty of people will at least wish they could."
Also, this is the sort of story that John at Detroitblog does really well. Sweet Juniper is a personal blog and I only plan to write about businesses in the context of how we shop in a city without much national retail; if you are interested in reading more generally about interesting Detroit businesses, there's no better place than Detroitblog.
A few months ago a writer for the Wall Street Journal bemoaned the lack of national retailers in this city with the overt message is that it is fundamentally a terrible thing. Later I read about Icelanders celebrating the retreat of McDonalds from Reykjavik as a silver lining to the economic collapse there (even the Wall Street Journal wryly notes, "As cultural calamities go, there are worse fates. . .") or small towns activists lauded for keeping out a Wal Mart, or resort towns like Saugatuck, Michigan celebrated for keeping out all national chains. But the fact that Detroit has but one Starbucks and no Wal-Mart means we should be rending our garments and pulling out all our hair.
I laugh when New Yorkers complain about the strip mauling of Times Square or when I hear their weird nostalgia for when it was seedy and dangerous. If you really miss seedy and dangerous, I know a house I can sell you for a dollar. Seriously. The fact that risk-averse national retail outlets who care only about the bottom line won't invest here is part of why I love living in Detroit. Being skipped by decades of prosperity means that this city doesn't look like everywhere else. It comes at quite a cost, but I'll be doggone if I wouldn't celebrate the absence of these national retailers rather than add it to the heap of things we already have to complain about here.
How can you live without a big box grocery store? Where do you shop if there aren't national retailers? The retail vacuum is filled by the sorts of small companies and individuals willing to take risks or persevere under circumstances that corporate retail giants wouldn't tolerate. I find it inspiring, and from time to time I am going to write about some of the businesses we love and support to provide a counterpoint to the Wall Street Journal's overblown funerary dirge for Detroit retail.
This is really just a prelude, or an explanation for a series of forthcoming posts.
Post #2: R. Hirt Jr. Est. 1887
Post #3: Honey Bee Market La Colmena, Est. 1956
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