Supermarkets are a miracle

Why did we ever take them for granted?

- By Bianca Bosker

Fairway Market, which credits itself with introducing New Yorkers to clementines, radicchio, fleur de sel, and vine-ripened fruit, started off as a small grocery store at 74th Street and Broadway, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where it still stands. According to family lore, Nathan Glickberg arrived at Ellis Island from Russia sometime in the 1910s, and by 1933 had saved up enough money to open his own fruit-and-vegetable store. Signs of a family fixation with produce are obvious in a black-and-white photo taken sometime in the vicinity of World War II: Nathan’s wife, Mary Glickberg, is dressed up in heels, pearls, and an omelet-fold updo and, for her formal portrait, positioned in front of the store’s rickety wood fruit crates, which are sagging under the weight of apples, lemons, and oranges stacked shoulder high. Pears back then came wrapped in squares of paper, which Nathan saved and placed beside the toilet. What was good enough for pears’ skin was, evidently, good enough for his.

In 1954, Nathan brought in his son, Leo. In 1974, Leo brought in his son, Howie, and together they brought in Harold Seybert and David Sneddon, brothers-in-law who’d sold tomatoes wholesale. On Howie, Harold, and David’s watch, the Fairway store grew, expanding into Tibbs luncheonette next door, then into the adjoining drugstore, and then into the D’Agostino supermarket to the north. “We were beating them up,” Howie told me cheerfully. “They couldn’t make a living.” In 1995, the partners opened a second Fairway, in a former meatpacking plant in Harlem. That brought in my grandmother, ecstatic at being able to shop at a supermarket just around the corner from her apartment. And my grandmother brought in me.