Fairway and What We Mourn in a Store

A person perusing the fruit selection at Fairway Market
It is hard not to feel a shrivel of the heart for the loss of Fairway, a place at once specific to New York City and open to anyone with the price of a potato in her pocket.Photograph by Jeenah Moon / Bloomberg / Getty

Eulogies for passing enterprises are hard to entertain, not because the enterprises are not significant in our lives but because they are entirely so—though in ways that are more mystically atmospheric than easily analyzed. What the city lost when, say, Bonwit Teller closed, or when Bendels shuttered, can’t be calculated the way that we calculate, or register in a single frame, the loss of a neighborhood, or even of a building—a Penn Station or a Singer Tower. Given the ongoing bottom line of money in and goods out, presumably every transaction that took place in a closing department store or a lost hardware store is taking place somewhere else—online, more likely than not. So what is lost is not the transaction but the civic ritual, the sense of place, the shared common space, the special scent and sweat—the feeling, if you like—that surrounded it.

This produces something like a paradox of possessiveness, a contradiction of consumption. We know that a transaction of money for goods is simply that, but at the same time we feel the passing of the place where the transaction occurred as something far more than a material loss. It is no accident, to use a locution favored by the Marxists, that John Updike, in detailing the last days of his echt-American character Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, made one of his final epiphanies the realization that the Christmas displays in the Kroll’s department store, in his mangy but beloved home town of Brewer, were merely commercial come-ons, to be discarded as soon as they stopped paying profits to the store’s owner—that what, in Harry’s boyhood, had been “those otherworldly displays of circling trains and nodding dolls and twinkling stars in the corner windows as if God Himself put them there” were not that at all. They were merely “a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of the money. . . . If Kroll’s could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they would close down God Himself.” A few pages later, Harry is struck by a heart attack, and the author shuts his hero down.

These gloomy reflections are spurred by the knowledge that the Fairway Market grocery store chain has filed for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy. There is hope that the failure will not be complete, as it was when another New York grocery chain, Dean & DeLuca, a relic of the minimalist art-world energies of the Soho eighties, went bankrupt last year and closed all its stores in New York. A last-minute, though apparently place-holding, purchase by a New Jersey supermarket chain promises to keep at least a few of the Fairway stores open, in some form or another. Still, to anyone who loves New York, even an intimation of losing Fairway is as sad as the sense of losing Kroll’s was to Harry.

Fairway is one of those odd original New York institutions that grew up organically, on the sidewalk, unlike the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s stores that have competed with it in recent years, which were dropped down on the street from a retail empire headquartered elsewhere. No less a magus of social history than Simon Schama once wrote of Fairway that if it were possible to award the congressional Medal of Honor to a food market, Fairway would already have won one for its service to appetite, and that its cheese department alone turned “Rabelaisian excess into a stationary New York festival of aroma, color and texture.”

Born in the early nineteen-thirties as a fruit-and-vegetable stand on the Upper West Side, Fairway was originally the multi-generation property and obsession of the Glickberg family, starting as a more down-market variant of Zabar’s, which is still in business up the street. Fairway’s magic, as one of its former partners, Steven Jenkins, wrote in a lively and lovely memoir of his years there, “The Food Life,” lay in the juxtaposition of grungy, discount-minded practicality with genuinely inspired and discriminating product choices. The store, with its proudly garish packaging and bags and an elevator that bore a sign boasting of its bad functioning, is stuffed with the usual supermarket staples, but it also offers some of the finest of fine things in the city. The olive-oil counter alone is worth the price of admission: seven or eight styles—Spanish, Italian, and Greek—to sample, with sliced baguettes on hand, around which a father and daughter could arrange a weekly tasting, while a mother shuddered at the unsanitariness of it. The West Side Fairway combines the virtues of what used to be called “gourmet” shopping—it’s now too commonplace to have that title—with the equally strong virtues of popularity. If you come from a grocer’s family, as I do, you recognize the familiar rhythms and joys and labors of every food market: the long hours, the early mornings, the constant restocking. Fairway, for all the precious things it sold, from Comté to saffron, was the least precious place on the planet.

The democratic energy of the place was so extraordinary that someone coming home to New York from a place like, say, Paris—where the division between the gastronomic and the generic, the élite and elementary is still strong—would be knocked sideways by the coexistence of those seemingly contradictory principles. As Jenkins wrote about his own emigration there, from a “classier” downtown boutique, “I had essentially been ripped from the urbane, everything-has-its-place, serene, haughty world of fancy food and thrust headlong into a peasant-like, sawdust-on-the-floor, ‘We’ll sell anything that sells’ commoners’ market.” That market engendered anecdotes. A friend remembered having been called away from her shopping cart the day before Thanksgiving and, wandering back into the store a few hours later, finding it still full, pushed and prodded like a bumper car among the throngs.

What went wrong with Fairway will likely be a case study in business schools for years to come. It seems, to the casual observer, to have an ominous overlap with what went wrong with Dean & DeLuca—or, for that matter, with F. A. O. Schwartz—and more broadly with what has gone wrong for so much American retailing. (As of 2018, some twenty per cent of retail space in Manhattan is vacant.) The agonies of Fairway are almost too neatly a lesson for our time. The family opened three more stores, and sold an eighty per cent stake in the company, in 2007, to a private-equity firm that thought it could, so to speak, exploit the social capital—the good will and the reputation for egalitarian excellence—that the firm had built up over time, to vastly expand and make vastly more money. The stores were then passed around like a trinket among a bewildering assortment of other investors. The bankruptcy seems likely to cost the employees far more than it will the investors—not to mention the customers. This, too, is part of our time: a recent report in the Washington Post points out that private-equity firms “pooled money—often from pension funds, wealthy investors and financial firms—and relied on large swaths of debt to acquire companies like Mervyn’s and Linens ’n Things, with the goal of turning them around. In practice, though, they routinely sold off real estate holdings, cut workers’ pay and benefits, and jettisoned jobs to turn a quick profit for investors.”

In Fairway’s case, the expansion was undertaken at the very moment when urban retailing of all kinds was coming under the most intense competitive pressure it has in perhaps a century, from online sources—you can buy groceries from Amazon and FreshDirect—and, indeed, on the street, from national chains, including Whole Foods, which is now owned by Amazon. One can be a fan of the many good things about Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s and also recognize that the homogenization of retailing is part of the homogenization of our lives.

All of us know—or, if we don’t, then capitalism is here to teach us—that things pass. It’s hard and even embarrassing to be emotional about a failing business. Those who mourn the demise of Barneys do so largely in private. And yet it is, historically, such private enterprises, from coffeehouses and grocery stores to high-end department stores, with their vast common spaces, that create the social capital that supports our common life—the possibility of bumping into people with whom we share a common citizenship but don’t often share a common space or pursuit. The accumulated social capital of such spaces becomes our common life. The single man buying cheese and the family buying paper towels in bulk stand in line together.

Every imaginable historical study and set of social-science data shows that the relationship between social capital—all those institutions of common space and trust, of casual encounter and shared memory—and healthy democratic government is as neatly tied, as robustly correlated, as two things can be. So the dislocation of common spaces into the online ether, though it is doubtless capable of being resolved in surprising ways we don’t yet know, is a thing that we are right to be concerned about.

Updike also wrote (in his own register, which was considerably more serene than that the one he lent to his hero Harry) that “at any moment an old world is collapsing and a new world arising; we have better eyes for the collapse than the rise, for the old one is the world we know.” This is, of course, good counsel for anyone inclined to be too teary about urban losses. New York has suffered countless commercial disappearances, from the roof garden on the old Madison Square Gardens to the destruction of the original Waldorf-Astoria, all of which felt fatal to earlier citizens’ sense of their city. Nonetheless, it is hard not to feel a shrivel of the heart for the loss of a place at once so specific to its city and so open to anyone with the price of a potato in her pocket, hard not to feel a tear falling in memory of grocery carts past. The price of any one store’s passing may be higher than we know.