(The following story by Kelly Egan appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.)

Grocery closing a blow to community

Kelly Egan
The Ottawa Citizen

Friday, October 13, 2006

A neighbourhood grocery store is the place where food and humanity, with all its myriad hungers, intersect every day.

At the corner of Booth and Eccles streets, there has been a grocery store of one kind or another for more than 50 years. The old-timers remember a smaller food supplier with a hardware store attached, at which you could buy guns.

Then came Desjardins’ IGA; then a Loeb, one of the smaller ones in the chain, perhaps 10,000 square feet, about a tenth the size of the new suburban giants.

The store sits on a hill, just a stone’s throw south of Somerset Street and the main spine of Chinatown. In the other direction, you can see the smallish spire of St. Anthony’s Church, the spiritual heart of Little Italy.

The store is closing on Nov. 25, basically because it doesn’t fit into Loeb’s future. It needs extensive renovations to be brought to the standard of its modern stores. Briefly, the company has decided it isn’t worth it.

There is no more interesting neighbourhood in Ottawa than these back slopes of Somerset, and possibly none that more desperately needs a walk-to grocery store. And, ironically, the neighbourhood is in mid-renaissance.

Gene Williams is the health promotion co-ordinator for the Somerset West Community Health Centre, which sits across the street and serves 8,000 patients and clients.

Fully 25 per cent of Ottawa’s rooming houses fall within the centre’s catchment area, while 60 per cent of clients earn less than $20,000 a year. The locals will tell you there are crack houses in the area, and crack-heads, and drunks, hookers and the mentally ill. There are also hundreds of seniors — 21 floors in one building on Rochester Street alone — many of them poor.

Mr. Williams says the closing of the store threatens the easy access of residents to cheap, nutritious food.

Remember, he cautions, you are talking about people living on society’s margins. It is all well and good to say “plan your week, take a bus to Bank Street or Hampton Park.” He is worried many will not do so, instead opting for junk-type food at higher prices in small convenience stores.

“The message is that people in the suburbs have better access to healthy food choices than people who live in the inner city.”

The centre also used to send people in crisis to the Loeb with food vouchers and use it as a supplier for those taking nutrition and cooking courses. What now?

Stand and watch 10 customers walk into the Loeb: nine of them are walking or on bicycles. This is the way neighbourhood stores are intended to work.

Mike Elliott has lived in the area for 14 years. He was leaving the store yesterday in a bicycle pulling a carrier that consisted of a large, empty television box on wheels. He runs a rebuilt-bike business and fancies himself a salvager.

Sure, he could bike to Hartman’s Independent Grocer on Bank, but there are hills to negotiate and the parking situation is not to his liking. He’s weighing his options.

Martin Vincent, 63, was driving a motorized scooter, a couple of loaves of bread in his basket. He has post-polio syndrome and his legs can’t carry him too far these days.

The scooter, though, is a godsend. Some days he travels to the Byward Market and back for a cup of coffee. Home is just a short ride away; he stops at Loeb a couple of times a week.

“What am I supposed to do in winter?” asked Mr. Vincent, referring to the longer scooter ride to another grocery store. “Put on a f—ing snowmobile suit?”

Jason Crawford, 33, a waiter and bartender, left the store with a couple of Loeb bags dangling from his bicycle handles. He’s used the store frequently in the last three years, as it falls on his route from home to the Plant Recreation Centre.

He likes the prices at the Loeb store and the fact that it caters to low-income residents. He pointed out, too, that not all staples — such as bread — are available in small Asian shops.

“That’s terrible, man. It sucks, really sucks,” said Mr. Crawford, when told of the impending closure.

Outside Giovanni’s, an Italian coffee shop where nary a word of English can be heard, Luigi Digregorio, 39, is holding court. “I’ve lived here 1,000 years. I’m older than Yoda.”

He’s been shopping at the store since he was a child or since Beowulf was around; it isn’t clear which. “Catastrophic” is how he described the closing, then elaborating in rapid, fragmented clauses. “The seniors who can’t walk very far. Lugging of groceries on the bus. Everybody knows everybody.”

To step back for a moment, it is a dilemma. A grocery chain has a corporate responsibility to support communities, but an essential requirement to be profitable, too. Survival demands it.

But what of “smart growth” and vibrant inner neighbourhoods? Sure, man gotta eat; but man gotta have a store.

It is unclear whether a new grocery concern might be able to take Loeb’s place. Mr. Williams said a neighbourhood forum is being organized for later this month or early November.

Contact Kelly Egan at 613-726-5896 or by e-mail, kegan@thecitizen.canwest.com

© The Ottawa Citizen 2006