Monday Bulletin: Corner Store Closure; Eclipse

Monday, April 8, 2024
Cloudy. High 64 degrees.

Notices
Our calendar has lots of local events! Click on the link or the lady in the upper righthand corner to check.

A solar eclipse will take place on Monday. You won’t have another chance to see one until 2044. The partial eclipse will begin at 2:10 p.m. The maximum eclipse coverage in New York City will happen at 3:25 p.m.

It is very important to not look directly at a solar eclipse. You must wear protective eyewear. To that end, Warby Parker locations are giving out free protective glasses to anybody who might want a pair.

Perspectives
By Gus Saltonstall

I’m hard pressed to think there will ever be an Upper West Side business closure more personal to me than Han’s Fruit & Vegetable Market on West 93rd Street and Broadway.

In 1998, shortly after the birth of my sister, my parents moved to West 93rd Street.

It is the apartment I grew up in. It is the apartment that my mom still lives in.

The store is part of a very short list of things when I think of home.

There is my family, my longtime neighbors, the view you get when you turn the corner on West End Avenue at 93rd Street, Joan of Arc Park nestled near Riverside Drive, and then there is Han’s Fruit & Vegetable Market.

We did not call it a deli, or a bodega, or a smoke shop. We called it the corner store. I don’t think I knew it had an actual name until late into my teenage years.

I’ve made an incalculable amount of 10-minute runs to the corner store to pick up eggs and lettuce for my mom, or to grab a Ben & Jerry’s pint and a Snapple, or a box of pasta and red sauce.

The corner store would be my landmark for knowing that I had made it home.

A train entrance to the 96th Street station sits at 93rd Street and Broadway just steps from the store. Before the pandemic, the store was open 24 hours and it was always a beacon of safety that I knew I could step into if I needed anything.

In some of those later in the evening moments is when I solidified my friendship with Lorenzo Galvez, who worked at the store for more than 30 years. He was always there. Always calm.

Sometimes we’d speak to each other in jumbled Spanish, other times in jumbled English.

He always asked about my mom and sister. He always called me “baby.”

For years, I figured his choice in nickname was down to a slight language barrier, but eventually I asked him one night why he always called me it.

“Because you’re the same age as my son. And I watched you grow up too,” he said.

His line was representative of the culture of everybody who worked in the store.

Joo and Jennie Han’s children were also the same age as me and my sister, something they reminded us of frequently, especially when Jennie would slip us small, free chocolates as we were checking out.

“Bring one to your mom,” she’d say with a smile.

But it went even further than that.

When I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at 15, the corner store was the first place we went after the hospital to try out the diet drinks that I was now constrained too.

A week later, I walked to the fridge section of the store to find three times the amount of diet sodas and juices that had been there before. They had added the selection without saying anything.

“To make it easier for you,” Joo said.

A year and a half later when I was told that gluten would also have to disappear from my diet, they added gluten free flour, cookies and snacks within the month.

The corner store is the type of family business that we seem to be losing in New York City. A store where the people know your name and your family. A type of business that does not get nearly the support it needs from the powers that be in the city as rents continue to rise and shopping patterns change.

The Han’s and the people that worked there were family in every sense of the word. I saw them more than the vast majority of people in my life. I cannot imagine walking by that corner and not having the store be there.

I will miss them dearly.

P.S. – It was incredibly bittersweet for me to write about the closure of Han’s Fruit & Vegetable Market last week. The experience was elevated tenfold, though, by the immense amount of love shared by readers with their own relationship with the longtime family market. I did not get emotional writing the story, but I did reading the more than 80 comments under the story. Thank you.

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