Friendly February Farming in Philadelphia

This seemingly bleak image – empty grocery shelves, forlorn shopping carts, ugly paneling, a ramshackle drop-ceiling – is actually cause for great hope.

I snapped this photograph back in February at what used to be Caruso’s Market, in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. For years, Caruso’s was a friendly, family-owned emporium that fit perfectly into the bustling, eclectic (and virtually national chain-free) Germantown Avenue shopping district. But, as with many family-owned businesses, eventually the founders needed to “cash out;” in this instance, they sold the store to a couple of unqualified investors who failed to thrive as grocers and shuttered the place last fall.

Enter the Weavers Way Co-op, long a mainstay of the nearby Mt. Airy neighborhood. Weavers Way agreed purchase the building for $2.8 million in January and plans to reopen the 6,700 square foot store this summer.

This is a big and bold leap for a co-op with around $8 million in sales (compared to our co-op’s annual sales of $68 million) and some 3,200 members (compared to our roughly 16,000). But nobody would accuse Weavers Way of being passive or cautious.

I used to think the Hanover Co-op was an unrivalled paragon of local agriculture until the affable Glenn Bergman, general manager at Weavers Way, took me to see his co-op’s thriving urban farm. There he walked me into a recently completed greenhouse and asked me to look down. What I saw were the plants from which the co-op had harvested greens that were sold just days earlier in the flagship Mt. Airy store. In February! Within the borders of a major American city!

As they say on late-night TV: But wait . . . there’s more. Another Weavers Way greenhouse stands on the grounds of Martin Luther King High School, which struggles to succeed in a neighborhood far more challenged and far less affluent than Chestnut Hill. By all accounts, the high schoolers are having a grand time learning how to grow stuff.

Not far away, in the West Oak Lane neighborhood, is Weavers Way Ogontz – opened last summer (at the instigation of a local legislator) to make produce available to an area that lacked such a store. And across the intersection at which the original Weavers Way store is the Co-op’s pet supply store. Staffing the place would be uneconomical, so if you need any pet items you first go into the main store, get the key, pick up your items across the street and return to let the cashiers know what you bought.

Clearly, Weavers Way is a cooperative that knows how to combine the entrepreneurial spirit with idealistic notions of public service.

What lessons for us in Hanover? Well, the short answer is: Ask Emily Neuman, our sustainability coordinator. She came to us from Weavers Way and knows its virtues intimately. Her energy and vision have a lot of Philadelphia in them.

Here’s a slightly longer answer: The new Weavers Way store is not guaranteed to succeed and, in truth, our Philadelphia friends are taking a big risk. But neither should we, or any other cooperator, be afraid to cross the divides we confront.

“Imagine an upscale provisioner to generations of Philadelphia's Brahmins being replaced by a commune of sorts selling organic rolled oats, pumpkin spice granola, and curly kale-baked tofu salad. Muscatel sentiments, if you will, inflicted on the martini set,” mused the Philadelphia Inquirer in February, alluding to the differences between Chestnut Hill and the Weavers Way home base in Mt. Airy. But in the very next sentence, the column dismissed such notions as “dated stereotypes” and noted the enthusiasm with which the co-op is being received in its new territory.

This is our moment, as cooperators, living in troubled economic times. There are people in our communities who need us, even though they do not know us. In the face of such challenges, doing nothing is the riskiest approach of all.