🧺 Ghost groceries of Longfellow

Before it was commonplace for the strata of people that settled in Longfellow to own a car (or, before that, a horse and buggy), most of life was conducted by foot or streetcar. Which meant, among other things, an evenly-spread demand for basic convenience shopping within a short walk of every home.

Enter: The corner grocery store, that ultimate emblem of old-timey neighborhood life. Mom-and-pop shops in the truest sense, these were modest operations named after the family who ran the business and lived onsite, selling basic dry goods, often clustered with a meat shop and bakery. Until the rise of the supermarket in the late 1950's, these stores were everywhere in the neighborhood — and not just along the commercial corridors, but tucked into the nooks and crannies of the residential fabric.

Some are still in use as commercial space, while others have long been torn down. But most interesting to me are the 17 I could find that have been repurposed into homes, sticking out from the craftsman bungalow masses with their boxiness and orientation toward the corner. They're visible reminders of a very different way of life that we're only two generations removed from.

I hit the archives and dug up what little history there is to be had on these places. I ended up using the names as they were listed in the somewhat arbitrary year of 1937, which I figured was near the peak of these types of joints: the neighborhood was fully developed, the economy mostly recovered from the depression, and even as more cars were hitting the road, the streetcar was still the city's organizing principle.

So, set your imagination to black-and-white and conjure images of smiling shopkeeps in suspenders, flour in jars, and kids playing stickball in the dusty street, as we visit some of Longfellow's Ghosts of Groceries Past.

Rustad Grocery

3301 31st Ave (built 1905)

Longtime proprietor Arne Rustad died in 1950, but the shop remained a grocery store into at least the mid-60s. The bottom picture depicts the inside of the shop in 1925.