Grocery Shopping in Geneva 1957
By Karen Osburn, Archvist
I don’t know about you, but I love to grocery shop. I love seeing the new products and choices and the incredible array of fresh fruits, vegetables, breads, fish and meats. I can go to the store for a jar of peanut butter and come home an hour later with cashew butter, peanut butter, almond butter, cherry jelly, 6 cans of beans in 6 different varieties, 3 birthday cards, a set of dishes, 10 varieties of tea, a chocolate sea salt toffee candy bar and a jug of cat litter. I will have spent way over my allotted food budget in a short period of time and loved every minute of it.
I remember going to the grocery store with my parents in the mid to late 1950s, when I was still quite young, and thinking that everyone drove to a shopping center. My family went to Northgate Plazawhere there were 2 grocery stores in the plaza; a Wegman’s and a Star Market. One store was on the north end of the plaza and the other on the west side. Sometimes we shopped at Wegman’s and sometimes we shopped at Star and on really good days we shopped for bargains at both! They both had coin operated rides in front of the stores that were usually horses and if I was really well behaved my dad might put a nickel in and let me ride the horse.
In my memory of those days we bought things like flour, eggs, butter, chuck roast, chicken, milk, sugar, toilet paper and whatever fresh fruit or vegetables were in season. My dad would often pick out a couple of chuck roasts and ask the butcher to grind them for him and we would have hamburger or meatloaf. We seldom bought already prepared foods as my mother was a good “from scratch” cook. When we finished checking out we got S&H green stamps with our receipt or a different type of stamp that was yellow. I was usually given the task of pasting the stamps in little booklets and when we saved enough books of stamps we went to the Green Stamp store and exchanged them for “gifts”, items like toasters, charcoal grills, lawn furniture etc. I loved this adventure in shopping too, though I never convinced my mother to get me the stuffed animal that was only ¾ of a book of stamps.
I grew up in a rural part of the Town of Greece and it never occurred to me that in cities like Geneva there were a lot different grocery stores that you could walk to! I pulled out the Geneva City Directory of 1957 to compare the stores in Geneva to the ones I remembered in Greece and found out that in 1957 there were 38 retail grocery and meat shops listed!! I knew that corner grocers were popular and necessary in that time period but to have 38 stores for 19,414 people meant one store for every 500 + people. These stores were spread all over the City on Castle, Genesee, Exchange, Seneca, Middle, North, High, Lyceum, John, Hamilton, Oak, Wadsworth, William, Angelo, and Andes streets to name some of them.
The stores had names like A&P, Acme Market Basket (there were 4 of those listed), Best Market, Brennan’s, Commesso Foods, The Corner Store, Crest Super Market, the Economy Store, Madia’s, Loblaw’s, Hamilton Food Market, Sunny Fruit Store and Thomas’ Red & White. That is only 13 out of 38! I am not sure what types of goods they stocked or how they would have compared to our two Greece Groceries, but I will bet they were plentifully supplied with a variety of good things.
One Geneva grocery in particular, Market Basket, was a big success story. Started in 1901 by Harry E. Hovey with one small store in Warsaw, NY he opened a store in Geneva in 1914 and eventually his business grew into 300 small groceries in central and western New York and by 1951 it had developed into 141 large self-serve supermarkets with a fleet of 35 trucks, their own carpentry shop, and its own “mimeograph” department.
When Harry Hovey died in 1953 Gordon Hovey, one of Harry’s sons became president of Market Basket. In 1956 a proposed sale of the business was announced by Gordon Hovey and Paul Cupp, president of American Stores; the merger was completed in April of 1956 and the Geneva headquarters of Market Basket closed.
Today Geneva has three supermarkets Wegmans, Tops, and Madia’s. Wal-mart has a large grocery section in their store on Hamilton Street as does BJ’s across the street. Red Jacket Orchards also has a store across the street from Wal-Mart that sells fresh fruit from their orchards and other locally produced food products. Wegman’s, Tops, Wal-mart , and Red Jacket are all located on Hamilton St. leaving Madia’s on the corner of Oak and Castle Streets as the lone representative of the once flourishing neighborhood food stores.
The way we purchase food has changed from what it was in the 1950s. The size of grocery stores has drastically increased while the number food stores in our cities have decreased, yet the variety of food items for sale would astound our parents and grandparents. I wonder what your children will remember in 50 years about their trips to the grocery store with you…..
Hi Karen-
Enjoyed your article!
In the 1950’s Gordon Hovey lived at 84 Maxwell Avenue. From 1955 though 1958, my mother taught at Prospect Road School and would often drive by his house, which she admired. One day she had the impulse to stop and let him know that if he ever wanted to sell it to please give her a call. He laughed at her as he was very happy there and had no intention of selling. Of course, she forced her phone number upon him.
A year or so later he did give her a call and explained that because of the Market Basket sale, he was going to have to move to Syracuse.and would she still be interested in his house. My parents bought his house and we moved there from Shortsville, NY. It was a great home that we enjoyed for 3 years before moving to Buffalo.
Best regards,
Charles Russell
I remember going to a grocery store in the 60’s at the corner of Rt 84 and Austin Rd when the family vacationed at Geneva-on-the-Lake. What was the name of that grocery store, it was just over the train tracks on Austin Rd
That was Geneva on the Lake in Ohio. We’re Geneva, NY and we do have a Geneva on the Lake but it wasn’t around in the 1960s.
What a fantastic article…! Thank you! My father did our grocery shopping and he preferred the smaller “Madia’s Big M” market on Castle Street to the larger grocery stores in town (which used to be the “Market Basket,” correct?). Bernie Madia, God rest his soul, let me borrow the Madia family’s scrap book’album which had much of the history in it. On a heavier note, my mother, Marge, was leaving the store through the then-Castle Street entrance just as the fire truck slammed into the building, killing one and injuring a few others. Mom was pregnant with our brother Jamie at the time and was just missed by a few feet as the truck slammed into the front door area as she passed through the then-front doors… The ingrates that pulled the alarm on West Ave (I think it’s known who they were but I’ll not mention any names) should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I don’t blame the driver, who never should have been confronted with the situation in the first place. We had lots of stores to bring return our deposit bottles for cash… but always bought my baseball and football cards at Bihary’s on the corner of William and Grove Street… which was before Palmieri’s was around… where I received a graduate degree in “hanging out with friends.” GREAT blog… thank you! Sharing this…