The contradictions of Upper West Side life
converge in one food store
On Sunday my husband Frank and I were steering our shopping cart down the condiments aisle, making for the deli department, when I spotted somebody I hadn't seen in fifteen years. He was bent over a bucket of Tunisian olives, right next to the cornichons.
"Walter!" I shouted, in a tizzy of surprise. What was he doing here in Harlem, when he lived--or so I thought--in deepest Brooklyn?
Immediately we were hugging and talking about divorces and the magazine business and the intervening years. All the while, I was making frantic hand signals to Frank--who was ten feet ahead with the cart--to make a U-turn.
Reversing direction at Fairway is trickier than landing at LaGuardia airport in fog, but Frank made a valiant effort. Within seconds, we'd thrown ourselves and the surrounding shoppers into Fairway gridlock, a state--I seem to remember--that Dante described as the third circle of Hell, but an everyday event for many who shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Nobody could move backwards or forwards, left or right. I braced for the filthy tirades and the tomato-throwing to begin. But, miraculously, we were met with indulgent smiles.
A bunch of my fellow New Yorkers were experiencing a collective moment of inexplicable niceness--something that does happen more often than you might expect, although not--generally speaking--during moments of gridlock.
For those not living in New York City, it can be hard to get a handle on this concept, but the average width of an aisle in a Manhattan grocery store is probably narrower than your arm span. In the world of New York markets, the three-lane shopping cart highway is a utopian fantasy, something we locals can only dream about.
Compared to most of the city's food stores, the aisles of Fairway are pretty decent. But they are also far more popular. Which makes the shopping experience something that can only be called Dantesque. One minute you're in Paradise, standing on tiptoe to snatch a jar of Moroccan harissa from an upper shelf, the next minute you feel the bar of a shopping cart battering your Achilles tendons and you're headed straight for Hell.
Like almost every other problem on our island, the ultimate cause of this madness is greed. The greed of landlords and real estate moguls, to be specific. I'm not going to mention names. But I will suggest that the next time you encounter a New York problem, or hear a crazy story about something in this town that doesn't make any sense, just take a breath and--as Deepthroat advised Bob Woodward--follow the money. If you do, chances are you'll find yourself nose-to-nose with one or more of the big real estate guys.
Most of the big guys, of course, don't shop at the Fairway on West 132nd Street. Most of them don't live in the neighborhood. But that doesn't stop them from buying and selling smaller and smaller pieces of the island for higher and higher prices. And the more real estate that changes hands, the narrower and more crowded the aisles of the markets become.
Somebody could probably figure out an algorithm to predict the ultimate outcome of this relationship. But it wouldn't be me. I've never been much good at abstract reasoning.
However, I am pretty good at following the money. It was money that first brought me to Fairway, two years ago. And--I admit it--I came to the Fairway habit very late. There are New Yorkers who've been shopping at Fairway for thirty, forty and even fifty years. But until recently I've never walked more than six blocks in any direction for the purpose of putting food on my table.
I have always believed in the Parisian approach to shopping. Stroll down the block and stop into the corner store to pick up a loaf of bread. Meander across the street to the green grocer to select the ingredients for a salad. Then swing over to Amsterdam Avenue to visit the fish monger. When it was time to stock up on soap and paper products, there was always a moderately-priced supermarket nearby. Until a couple of years ago, that was my life as a shopper.
The day the first domino fell is still vivid in my memory. It was twelve years ago, when our favorite green grocer announced he was moving to Rhinebeck, New York. This was a business that had been in the neighborhood for forty years. I'd been shopping there for close to twenty. Our daughter had learned to talk as I maneuvered her through the narrow aisles in her stroller.
"That's a banana. Can you say that word?"
"Banana."
"Very good! And look over here. What's this beautiful red thing?"
"Apple."
"Yes! You're right! It's an apple, a MacIntosh apple!"
Sometimes, Marina would surreptitiously steal a lime or a fig and hide it under her blanket. We'd have to do an about face on Broadway and bring it back.
The Indian woman at the cash register gave out cherries and grapes to all well-behaved toddlers... and even those who were not. The Nigerian guy who stocked the shelves played peek-a-boo with the babies, while their parents contemplated the artichokes.
"Why move?" I asked the Greek owner, in consternation. "Can't you just raise your prices a little bit?"
"Right now, we're just managing to pay $8,000 a month rent. The landlord's raising it to $30,000. There's no way you can raise the price of broccoli high enough to cover that," he told me.
Within weeks, the green grocer had been replaced by a charming cafe, which was soon replaced by an atmospheric restaurant and then by another and then another after that. In the intervening years, I've lost track. Nobody, it seems, has been able to cover the rent and provide good, affordable service.
In quick succession, our other neighborhood food stores followed suit, bidding farewell to customers they had served for decades and leaving their vacant spaces to Starbucks and Duane Reade. The few grocery stores and supermarkets that remained went upscale in a big way. I'm talking four-dollar loves of bread and two-dollar designer tomatoes. Plausible, perhaps, if you are a single Wall Street trader. But not for most of the rest of us.
And so it was that I turned to Frank one day, and uttered those inevitable words, "I think it's time to check out Fairway."
When shopping at the uptown store, a mate is of the utmost importance. Although it is technically possible to shop that Fairway on your own, it is not advisable--unless you are planning to purchase a very small quantity of groceries.
First, there is the matter of brute strength. It takes muscle to navigate your heavily-laden shopping cart among the hundreds of others--not so much to get it rolling as to stop it, sometimes very suddenly, when a clueless gourmet darts across your path, heading for the chanterelles, for instance. If you don't own a car, as we don't, there is also the trip home to consider, the hailing of the taxi and the loading of the packages amidst traffic.
The secret to Fairway's success may be that it manages to be almost all things to almost all people. It offers Osetra caviar and dry-aged steaks, but also single servings of lasagna, Thai dumplings-to-go and family-packs of burgers and chicken wings. Whether they are cooking for their families, throwing soirees on West End Avenue or stocking up for barbecues for the basketball team in Riverside Park, thousands of Upper West Siders do their shopping there every week.
On Sundays, when we usually shop at Fairway, it is a din of voices in a multitude of tongues: Italian couples critique the broccoli rape, Russian Jews argue over kosher chickens, Senegalese drummers recommend lentils to French graduate students and Mexican stock clerks try to translate the names of vegetables they never saw before yesterday into a language that never imagined them.
The uptown Fairway's meat and seafood department, known as the cold room, is legendary. It may be the only place in New York where you need to don a jacket, even in August, to choose the meat for your dinner. They keep the temperature in the vast room at 40 degrees. A row of black, quilted jackets hangs on pegs outside the swinging doors for the convenience of shoppers.
The good news about the cold room is there are real butchers and fish mongers you can talk to. The bad news is that it's too cold to have anything more than the briefest exchange. Sometimes I wonder if management keeps the temperature so low just to decrease the traffic jams. A typical conversation with one of the butchers goes like this:
"Good afternoon. Can you tell me if you've got any lamb sausage today?"
"Nope. Sorry. Next!"
Despite such moments, I have to admit that Fairway is a vital, sometimes even an exuberant place. When shoppers aren't scowling, they tend to be laughing. Where else can you find a store where socialites chat with Harlem grandmothers and fifth graders discuss bouillabaisse recipes with their dads? And, although the screeching voice of a two-year-old may sometimes drown out your conversation, if you listen carefully, the toddler is likely to be shouting something like, "pomegranate!"
On Sunday, Frank and I completed the bulk of our weekly shopping for $167, plus a tip to the bagger. A hefty grocery bill in the overall scheme of things, but not bad for Manhattan. I followed with the bags of fragile vegetables, as he wheeled the heavy cart down the ramp to 132nd street.
If you had told me, twenty years ago, that I'd be traveling 22 blocks to shop for food, I would have thought you were crazy. But New York has changed a lot in the last two decades and--like it or not--so have I. Although I may kvetch about the uptown trek, the truth is I sort of look forward to our Sunday excursions. At Fairway, I never know when I'm going to find a strange new vegetable or a long-lost friend pondering Tunisian olives.
1 comment:
Thanks for your piece on Kahlo. The thing that struck me on first seeing her work in a museum (I knew it from reproductions): the relatively small size of her paintings. In reproduction, they seemed epic.
Phil Fried
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