Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like Episode 3, These Are My Neighbors
This blog parses the changes in my middle age and how I went from a columnist at a major daily newspaper and a leading cheesemonger to a beer buyer at a fancy grocery store and how why I maintain hope of finding happiness. It’s underpinned by an element of confusion fatigue, frustration fatigue and fatigue fatigue, but it’s about life and downward mobility in New York City 2018, which is never dull.
When I moved into my current apartment in 1992, it was the last of my “post collegiate” moves. In other words, rather than calling a moving company, I rang up some old pals, and they came over, rolled up their sleeves, carried my furniture, books, music (music mostly involved objects like LPs and CDs back then), and miscellany down a floor from my old apartment and up two to the new place, which was just around the corner. It was my third move in four years and about half of my friends were enthusiastically suggesting I get comfortable in my digs for a change (advice I took). The other half openly worried about my new building. There was a bullet hole in the vestibule door.
I shrugged it off. It’s the East Village, I explained to an array of furrowed brows before buzzing the pizza deliveryman in. My comments weren’t intended as snark. In my first East Village apartment, which was near Avenue B, flanked by and across the street from some abandoned buildings, things were sometimes, well, interesting. One afternoon, I had to call out as late to my food job. The crackheads — yes, it was 1989 or so — had gotten their hands on some guns and were playing cops and robbers. The real cops were waiting at the corner for the ammunition to run out before moving in. After about a half hour, it did, and I hurried off to the store, which was on the Upper East Side. Upon my arrival, my coworkers pressed me for details. I heaved a sigh and told them that the block used to be better; until a few months before then, the drug of choice was heroin, and that cohort was much more chill.
Many of my coworkers at my current store weren’t born yet or were barely out of diapers when Avenue B and crack den were an obvious formulation if not an implicit one, and they respond to that story with the same incredulity of my Upper East Side colleagues from the Bush 1 era. Today, the neighborhood is served by two Whole Foods, a Trader Joe’s, a Union Market and the store I work at. There is at least one high end restaurant, one upscale fast casual place, and one artisan (i.e. better than Starbucks) coffee house on almost every block. It seems like the crack dealers from the late 80s might struggle to make rent in the new East Village.
In my 34 years in the New York City specialty food biz, I’ve worked on the Upper East Side, Kips Bay, the Union Square area, Williamsburg and the Upper West Side. When I took my current gig, it was my first time having my neighbors as my clientele. I wasn’t sure what to expect.
Well before working there became a possibility, I had thought that the store’s arrival showed some serious intelligence on the part of ownership. When Whole Foods opened their Union Square store in 2004, many of the smaller grocery stores in a mile range of it, used the arrival as an excuse to jack their prices. Suddenly the fifty cent lemons were 89 cents, the same price as WF. Nevermind that the WF lemons were big and juicy and sweet and the small grocery store ones looked like they’d been whacked around a golf course a bit. People decided that if they were going to pay Whole Foods prices, they might as well shop at the real thing rather than the weak imitation. Our store offers that level quality at a price that usually compares well with that national chain. And we’re closer to the East Village by two blocks. It seemed like a good idea.
To my delight, my neighbors got it. I heard only a little grousing about the prices, which may be the reflect some gentrification fatigue among them. We’ve grown accustomed to the idea that a great beer in a bar might run nine dollars, a glass wine in a similar establishment goes for $14 and a latte might set you back five. It also reflects that my neighbors have grown accustomed to fancy food.
Fancy food shopping has existed in New York City for more than a century, but fancy grocery stores, where you can buy fresh morels or bottles of house squeezed pomegranate/blueberry juice on one aisle then two aisles over you can get half gallons of Tropicana orange juice or two-liter bottles of Coke, are a more recent phenomenon. At some level they represent the merger of the neighborhood market and the gourmand’s emporium. These sorts of stores combine both extremes of retailing. Supermarket shopping is generally pretty utilitarian; it’s rare to see someone stand in front of boxes of Cheerios fantasizing about class or sophistication mobility. OTOH it happens all the time in front of more exotic and expensive items. It’s the point of shopping rather than contracting a service to do it for you. The tactile act of hunting and gathering your own nutrition often hints at transformative possibility, so do those nine-dollar beers and fourteen-dollar glasses of wine.
Since people could pretty much tell by looking at me that I spoke English as a first language, I quickly expanded my “Mr. Peabody of malt and hops” routine into being a floor supervisor, happily directing customers to the odd nooks and crannies where they might find, tahini, bread crumbs, pita chips or microwavable popcorn. In the process, a nice rapport developed both with the clientele and with my coworkers since they could steer any customer my way. The old timers in the neighborhood recognized me as a kindred spirit. The usual mix of young professionals that now inhabit the sleek new buildings in the neighborhood liked me for my food savvy and other interests; it makes a good impression when some twentysomething asks if I’m watching the World Series and I mention the article I’d written on it for Slate.
Even though the store is spacious, it still gets congested as a midtown avenue at rush hour, and it brings out the worst in the Manhattanites. About once a month, I’ll be in the way of a woman with a shopping cart, usually explaining to another customer a product location or something relevant to the proceedings like that. The shopping cart woman will bump me as a means of getting me to move. When I was on the Upper East or Westside, I might slide to the side and apologize. Here, I throw a shady look back at the shopping cart woman. You’re in my house in my ‘hood. Courtesy will be maintained.
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A few weeks after the crack house cops-and-robbers incident, I was at Valzac, a bar on Avenue B, with two coworkers from the Upper East Side store. One of them, a college student who lived in the East Village and played bass in a thrash metal band, reflected on the contrasts between where we work and where we live. He said that our Upper East Side shoppers and our crack head neighbors weren’t really that different; the uptown drug of choice was legal, though. It’s an association that someone can only make when Hegel or Nietzsche are in season, but it was charming nonetheless.
Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.
