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“I wouldn’t say we’re stronger than ever but I would say we’re working on being stronger than ever, and we’re working on making our market more customer-friendly so that the customers that used to come down, and don’t anymore, will revisit the market,” Domenick Crimi, the owner of Cappucio’s Meats, 1019 S. Ninth St., and newly-elected president of the board of directors for the South 9th Street Business Association, said Tuesday.
The family-owned butcher business has been going strong since 1920, and Crimi sees his goals for his term as leader of the Association fairly simply.
“One of the biggest goals is to get the press out, to get the word out that the Ninth Street Market is alive and well, with some new faces and some old faces,” the proprietor said. “As we like to say, ‘Come visit the Italian Market again for the first time.’”
The Market has been a staple of South Philadelphia’s Italian community, serving as a Main Street of sorts for more than a decade. In that time, the street, the market and the business association have seen many ups and downs. But as the Association’s business manager and vendor coordinator, Michele Gambino, puts it, it’s always been about food.
“If you walk up and down the street, things are very familiar. It’s about the home, the kitchen, the food – it’s about a walking experience and about eating,” the 2000 block of Emily Street resident said from the Association’s Visitor Center, 919 S. Ninth St.
She compelled readers to think of all the time periods the Market’s endured.
“Depression, wars, recessions, economic good times, changing demographics, people fleeing and coming back to the city,” she listed, “through all of that time it has survived. And it has survived because everyone loves to eat.”
The Market and Association experienced a few periods of dormancy, but in 2000, with a rejuvenated Italian Market Festival backed by a revitalized Association board, they doubled down on establishing the Market’s strength and guaranteeing it’s here for generations to come.
“We came up with five-year goals and ten-year goals,” Gambino explained, “because we know we have to bring the market into the next 100 years and everything’s changing. One of our goals was to revitalize the street and part of that was to revitalize the curbstands. The curbstands are what separate Ninth Street from the entire United States.”
That’s included dogging missing vendors who may have vacant curbstands, even while paying the $300 monthly rent, for when they’re coming back and if they’ll allow another business to use the space temporarily. There are currently 69 curbstands on South Ninth between Christian Street and Washington Avenue, the two densest blocks for the sidewalk-friendly businesses. And two of them are brand new: Cookie Ciliberti’s 2 Hot 2 Handle Hot Sauce (909 S. Ninth St., Stand No. 8) and Dorrie Lambert’s Ginger Snap’s Grocery, right next to Ciliberti.
Ciliberti was formerly involved on the Association board but left to spend time on developing her sidewalk small business.
“We did a lot of research,” she said, meaning traveling to Tennessee and New Orleans and bringing home hot sauces instead of snow globes. “We started working on this project in October, and it took us until July to get it to come together.”
That would include the myriad of licenses required of curbstand businesses: business privilege, weights and measures, health department, business taxes, to name a few. Ciliberti joked that when Gambino came to check on her aunt Betty Ann Mongelluzzo’s flower shop (Betty Ann’s Italian Market Florist, 902 S. Ninth St.), she handed Gambino a stack of licenses, including an alarm registration fee ($50).
When Gambino put out the call for applications to fill empty curbstands, she got an enormous response. But once potential vendors realized the paperwork and rent that’s required, the eligible and able small business owners dwindled.
“We probably got about 150 requests, and we sent paperwork to all of those people,” Gambino detailed. “Out of the 150, we probably got back about a dozen applications. Out of the dozen variable applications, there were probably about four that could start a business.”
But even with license and registration fees and monthly rent, small businesses can still offer deeply-reduced prices on produce, dairy and fruit.
“We love the fact that that’s the case,” Gambino said of the Market’s reputation for offering cheap eats that are fresh and healthy. “The reason they can sell produced affordably is there’s way less overhead.”
As she points out, curbstand business owners are the stock boy, the cashier, the manager and the customer service representative.
Blue Corn, 940 S. Ninth St., is the newest kid on the block, a Mexican restaurant and bar that joins three- and four-generation neighbors like Ralph’s Italian Restaurant, 760 S. Ninth St., Esposito’s Meats, 1001 S. Ninth St., Isgro’s Pastries, 1009 Christian St., Claudio’s Specialty Foods, 924-926 S. Ninth St., Di Bruno Bros., 930 S. Ninth St., and Crimi’s Cappucio’s.
“Everything’s going well,” Amado Sandoval, a part-owner with family members who runs the month-old eatery’s bar program, reported.
They’ve received praise from a number of city publications and blogs and reports that the community’s been welcoming.
“After the first week, we felt like a part of the family. The response in the neighborhood has been all good,” Sandoval said.
He and his brothers Maximino, Augustin and Dionicia could be seen as representative of the influx of Asian and Latin communities that populate the curbstand businesses. And as Crimi makes it clear, as long as the stands are being used, he doesn’t care what color their skin is.
“They’re the face of the Market. Ninth Street has always been about the curbstands,” the association president said.
In addition to changing neighborhood demographics, he knows that new generations don’t always want to follow in their parents’ Ninth Street footsteps.
“You want your kids to do better than you did so you put a kid through college and they go off and get a suit-and-tie job,” he said.
Many families who’ve been up and down South Ninth Street their whole lives don’t hold on to their curbstand plots and give them away to eager immigrants.
“The Mexicans work just as hard as the Italians, and they’re good people,” Crimi said, “and we can’t have empty stands.”
Staff Writer Bill Chenevert at bchenevert@southphillyreview.com or ext. 117.
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