The History of Here by Norder Akum

Author:Norder, Akum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

1. Seventeen years younger than I, she came to the Capital Region in 2008 to attend RPI, providing me, for a short time at least, with local family whose good nature I could exploit.

13

The Gentle Man with the Meat Cleaver

Remember the butcher with the army of kids and the bad feet? His story didn’t end with the war.

Pete Girzone opened his second shop, Peter’s Market, here on West Lawrence Street in the years after World War II. If the little cinderblock shop was still standing, I’d be able to see it from my front steps. It was tucked behind a Madison Avenue liquor store and right across the street—spitting distance—from the Miracle Market, the grocery store that moved into the old Pine Hills movie house in the early 1930s, after silent films died their silent death.

“It was a little two-bit store, only a postage stamp size,” remembered Father Joseph Girzone, Pete’s oldest son. “There were two big supermarkets right nearby—how could he open a store? He would say, ‘I have my own clientele.’ ”

That clientele included state officials, judges, lawyers, doctors, and other well-to-do Pine Hills homeowners. Peter Girzone knew what they liked: high-quality meat cut just the way they wanted. But that wasn’t all that kept them coming back. Pete was a man of powerful faith and a keen observer of human nature. Some of those same prominent Albanians whose iceboxes he kept stocked could be found sitting in his market late into the night, talking spirituality and politics with the butcher.

October 1947 was a terrible time to be opening a butcher shop. Meat shortages and record-high prices were front-page news. And there was more to come: President Truman was pushing for restaurants and homes to adopt “meatless Tuesdays” to help feed postwar Europe. Albany’s meat dealers told the Times-Union early that month that “sales are off so much anyway because of high prices that a meatless day won’t make much difference.”

And there was stiff competition for those dwindling sales. Albany’s 1948 business directory lists nearly two full columns of retail butchers: 123 entries, some with more than one location. There were about two and a half pages of retail grocers—hundreds of little shops across the city, including five other grocery stores in the upper Madison area.

It was completely characteristic of Peter Girzone that he went ahead and opened his little shop despite these warning signs: he lived every day by the belief that the big picture was in God’s hands, and he was just going to do what he knew how to do. And the butcher business was what Pete knew. As a young man he had worked for the Tobin Packing Company in West Albany, and later he took a job at Johnston and Linsley’s, a grocer’s on Madison Avenue in the block between Allen and West Lawrence. Around 1934, with a growing family to support, Peter thought he’d go into business for himself. He opened the Pine Hills Food Market, a combination butcher counter/neighborhood market in space that today is part of Junior’s Bar and Grill.

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