Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  What kept me going was holding on to my grandfather’s mentality: Keep Your eye on the register, make sure your customers are happy, give them quality. Limit yourself to one store. Survive.

  I maintained the Russ and Daughters obsession: one slice at a time, nothing pre-packaged. Today they call it the “slow-food” movement. I run the store pretty much the same way my grandfather and his daughters and their husbands did. We sell the same products, even the dried Polish mushrooms that they used for sauces and mushroom and barley soup. Once they were a cheap staple. Today we sell them for $150 a pound. They’re impossible to come by, and there is little market for them. The rest of the world becomes homogenized; this store stays the same. We try to be historically consistent in the look, the food, the service. But I did get my own counter people, who are nice to the customers. And they can cut salmon with the best of them.

  ANDY BALDUCCI: I was born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 1925. When I was two months old, my mom said, “Let’s go back to Italy and get the boys baptized.” So my mother, my brother, and I went back to her hometown below Naples.

  NINA BALDUCCI: Andy’s mom was the only girl in a family of six children, and when she got married, her mother made my father-in-law promise not to take her only daughter away from her. He tried to find a business in Italy. But he had had a taste of America and simply had to come back. After Andy was born, however, his mother returned with her boys to Italy and stayed for fourteen years.

  ANDY BALDUCCI: All during that time, Pop went back and forth. Each time he went to Italy, he would leave a fruit market he had built up to one of his brothers or a cousin. In Italy, he was not too successful. It was during the Mussolini era, when it was very difficult for anyone who had immigrated to get permits, licenses. Finally in 1939, the family came back to the United States.

  I began working for my father’s younger brother, Frank, in his fruit market on Main Street in Flushing. As I got a little older, my uncle made me the manager of his other store in Jackson Heights, which had once belonged to my father. Lo and behold, World War II broke out. I was drafted, served in the navy, and participated in the invasion of Normandy, where I was wounded. But then it’s 1945. I’m back, safe and sound as could possibly be, happy to be working for Uncle Frank again.

  One day when we came back from the market, my uncle said, “Andy, I want to drive you home.”

  “Any problems?”

  “No, I want to talk to your father.”

  At that time, my father had a little ice business. He was carrying ice up flights of stairs in a burlap bag. “Louie,” my uncle says, “David Yekes (of Yekes and Eichenbaum, one of the wholesale houses in the Washington Market) told me there’s an open-air market in Greenwich Village looking for a good operator. Andy likes what he’s doing and he shows very good enthusiasm for the product and the market. You know the business. Let’s go take a look at it.”

  So the three of us went to see the property. The block was city owned and could never be developed other than light-duty stores because of the subway underneath. It started with a newsstand that went down Sixth Avenue and rolled around Greenwich Avenue all the way up to Christopher Street. There was also a little grocery store and a bakery.

  We look at the market: a thirty-foot front, approximately twenty to twenty-five feet deep, a tin roof, a dirt floor, no doors, no windows, no heating, no bathroom, no basement—nothing but flies because when you attempt to sell fruits, especially in the summer, and you don’t move the product fast enough, the sugar in the fruit turns to molasses.

  Gus Klopstock owned the lease for the entire block. He was a wonderful man, a reformed alcoholic, a reformed gambler, and a Christian Scientist. He lived in the penthouse at 1 Christopher Street, where he had every kind of parrot you could imagine. He looks at the place with us, sees nothing but flies. “Will twenty-five dollars a month be all right?” he asks. “The first six months are free.”

  I put up the name: “Balducci Produce.”

  Pop said, “What is this ‘Produce’? Why don’t you put ‘Balducci Fruit and Vegetables’?”

  “Pop,” I said, “‘Produce’ is a little better.”

  It doesn’t take us long. Inside of a year, we’ve chased away all the flies, put in a concrete floor, put a bathtub in the back room to wash the produce, made a little office in the back with a refrigerator. Mr. Klopstock arranges for us to be able to use the bathroom in the grocery store two doors down.

  We buy a little truck. Every day we drive in from Little Neck to Manhattan. Mama’s at the register, Pop’s very content to have his lunch on an empty apple box. We’re busy from six or seven in the morning until eleven at night because the Village has early people, midday people, late people. The store is open around the clock. Pencil on the ear, brown bag. That’s the action.

  After a while, we move from Little Neck to an apartment at 9 Christopher Street, right around the corner from the store, on the fourth floor of a walkup. It was my mother, my father, me, and my sister, Grace, who was a little girl then.

  The business wasn’t new to me. I’d been in Flushing with one trade, in Jackson Heights with another. The minute we opened, I recognized the trade we had, and that’s what we went after. These people were looking for high-quality merchandise: mushrooms, a nice bunch of radish, a beautiful bunch of grapes, an artichoke, an expensive apple—nineteen cents a pound—red Delicious, golden Delicious, each individually wrapped.

  One day, my Uncle Mauro’s son Charles said, “Andy, maybe I could raise mushrooms for you.”

  I said, “Great, Charlie.”

  We subsidized his operation in Tough Kenamon, Pennsylvania. It became the world’s center of mushroom growing and canning. Every night, Charlie would load up his pickup truck with pearl-white mushrooms, the champignon type. He’d be at the store by six in the morning. We’re selling the most gorgeous mushrooms, thirty-nine cents a pound. People are coming from all over the city, Brooklyn, Jersey. They’re buying not by the pound but by the three-pound basket for a dollar.

  We didn’t know what income tax was, what social security tax was. The small open-air markets operated on cash; the wholesale market was cash. But after a while, I said, “Pop, I want to pay by check.” I did all the entries in the book, made out the checks for what we bought each week and sent them to the market.

  The only problem was my father didn’t believe in banks. He literally put his money under the mattress. So once a week, I would be called by Mr. Pinto, the president of Manufacturers Hanover on Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place. “Andy, you need three hundred dollars to cover the checks.”

  One day Mr. Klopstock came to me. “Andy, I got myself in a little bit of trouble. I could use twenty thousand dollars. I’ll give you the lease I have with the city for collateral.”

  I said, “Sure, let me ask my father.”

  His intention was totally honorable. But my father didn’t believe, or he didn’t have the foresight, and he turned Mr. Klopstock down. The way we were brought up, the father is the boss. The only one above him is God. So my father’s word was final.

  The little baker on the corner, a Jewish fellow, gave Mr. Klopstock the twenty thousand dollars. Lo and behold, the day comes they find Mr. Klopstock dead of a heart attack. The baker gets the lease for what has become a very valuable location. From twenty-five dollars a month in the late 1940s, we were paying fifteen hundred dollars a month by the late 1960s.

  Now the baker’s lawyer comes in and says, “Andy, your lease will be up in a month or two. Be prepared to pay forty thousand dollars a year.” That was more than double. Meanwhile, my father, who didn’t begin paying taxes until the late 1950s, turned sixty-five and wanted to get the money he paid in social security taxes back. The accountant told me, “Andy, your father’s on the phone every night. He wants to retire. He wants to get that seventy-nine dollars a month.”

  When the forty-thousand dollar lease came up, that was the last thing Pop wanted to hear. “What are we going to do?” he asked.
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  Directly across Sixth Avenue was 69 West 9th Street, a twelve-story apartment building that I watched go up. It had a beauty parlor, a watch repair shop, a stock brokerage that took up the two center stores, and a Japanese import shop. It was 1970, the stock market wasn’t doing much. The stock brokerage firm closed, and the two center stores, thirty-three hundred square feet, were available for thirty-six thousand dollars a year.

  “Pop,” I said, “it’s time we got off the sidewalk. It’s time we got doors, Pop, a bathroom, a basement. It’s time to go dalla stalla alle stelle [from the stable to the stars].”

  I went to the bank. By now, Mr. Pinto had retired. The new president was Ed Corliss. “Ed,” I said, “I want to build a store across the street. I need about two hundred thousand dollars.”

  He took me downstairs to the office of Manufacturers Hanover where the vault was. “It’s a great idea, Andy, it’s a good thing. But how do I substantiate two hundred thousand dollars? You never put any money in the bank. We have to keep asking you to bring money in to cover the checks.”

  I said, “I’m not going to put the two hundred thousand dollars in my pocket. I’m going to use it to buy fixtures. Take a mortgage on the fixtures.” On that strength we got the money.

  The day we were going to sign the new lease, my father called me up at four in the morning. “Please don’t take me to the lawyer with you,” he said. He didn’t want to move.

  By this time, Pop and Mama—together with my brother, who was a doctor, and his family—were living in a beautiful two-story brick-face house in Flushing that Pop bought for thirty-five thousand dollars cash. My brother had told my father, “If something goes wrong, you may risk the roof of your house.” Pop got scared.

  Up to this point, my father had been the sole owner of everything. But now I formed a new corporation with the names of myself, my wife, my sister Grace, and her husband, Joe. We were the new owners of Balducci’s.

  In our hearts nothing had changed. Mama was still the cashier. All the money still went to Flushing. Pop and Mama still went to Italy three months every year. Pop got a new car every other year. But now the business technically was owned by four younger people.

  And it was no longer Balducci Produce, but Balducci’s. We realized that the same clientele that needs a beautiful artichoke, a beautiful mushroom, a nice bunch of grapes needs a slice of prosciutto, a good piece of fish or meat, a good piece of bread, a nice dessert. Through the years, our customers had to go down the street for one thing, to Little Italy for something else, to Ninth Avenue for something else, even to Brooklyn for different specialties. The table was getting more and more sophisticated as people began to travel. Italy, in particular, became the paradise.

  NINA BALDUCCI: The grand opening was Thursday, March 24, 1972. The night before, nobody slept. All our vendors were helping us stock the shelves. In the morning, Channel 7 News was there to photograph the event. Mom and Pop came up in a limo. They walked up a red carpet, and Mom cut the ribbon. Grace and I were the cashiers, and we did a real bang-up business from eleven in the morning until ten at night.

  We started with what we knew best, beautiful fruits and vegetables, which remains our mother department, a lot of dried fruits and nuts in the front window. We had a simple deli with the Italian cold cuts, some cheeses and smoked fish. We had olive oil, vinegar, preserves. It was very, very simple.

  When the beauty parlor on 9th Street and Sixth went out in 1974, we took over that space and expanded the deli, cheese, smoked fish department. We also built Mom a kitchen so she could prepare items like eggplant parmesan and her tomato sauce, which we sold in the deli. A few years later, the Japanese store went out, and we took over that space. “This is the time we’re going to complete the table,” Andy said. And that was when we opened the fresh fish and meat departments.

  I always do my own shopping. One afternoon I was going around with a cart when Andy’s cousin Charlie called to me. “Nina,” he said, “would you like to meet Lauren Bacall?”

  “I’d love to.”

  She saw I was shopping, got herself a cart, and fell right in step with me. “I want to see what you and Andy eat so I can get the same thing,” she said.

  ANDY BALDUCCI: We came up with a very beautiful shopping bag because we wanted people to walk out with something nice. It cost us more than the twenty-five cents we charged as an accommodation. One day when there was a long line at the register, a customer in the front began haggling. She didn’t want to pay for the shopping bag. Suddenly someone at the back of the line yelled out, “Get that lady the hell out of there. Throw her out of the store.”

  I take a look. It was Jack Nicholson. “How the hell do you put up with that nonsense?” he said to me.

  Balducci’s have sprung up all over the country. They’re not called Balducci’s, but it’s the same idea. People came, they looked, they went back home and tried to do the same thing. You think about the energy that goes into a business like this. Washington Market was one kind of energy. Balducci Produce was another kind of energy. Balducci’s is yet a different energy focused on a sophisticated market, a complete table.

  JERRY DELLA FEMINA: I married very young and was doing two, three jobs, living my father’s life. Christmastime I would get work at Macy’s or Gimbel’s to supplement whatever salary I had. One year I went to Macy’s for my annual job and they said, “Everyone has to take a test from now on.” I went into this room with fifteen to twenty other guys, took the test, and failed. I have a learning disability; I was never able to take a written test. That was a real down point. But even then I never lost the faith that it was going to happen for me. The image of the copywriter with his feet on the desk I had seen when I was delivering messages for the Mercury Messenger Service stayed with me.

  I got a job in the mail room at Ruth, Reuff, and Ryan, in the Chrysler Building. “Their clients included Pontiac, Kentile, Arthur Murray Dance Studios, and Bon Ami with the little yellow chick—“Hasn’t scratched yet” was their motto. Most of the guys who worked there were wealthy kids from Harvard, Princeton, Yale. They wanted a career in advertising, and the mail room was the traditional way to start.

  I used to run around with the advertising plates in the one suit I owned, a heavy, winter, dark brown suit that I got from Korvette’s for twenty-two dollars. The texture was pretty much that of a rug. My choice was freeze in the winter or swelter in the summer. I went for sweltering.

  After a while, I got promoted into the production department, and my salary was raised to twenty-one dollars a week. They told me it was the second promotion in the history of Ruth, Reuff, and Ryan from the mail room. “Who was the first?” I asked.

  “David Mahoney. Today he’s the head of Good Humor Ice Cream.”

  “You mean all I can look forward to is selling ice cream?” I said.

  I was a wisecracker. Being verbal has always been my compensation for my learning disability.

  I decided to make up ads for how advertising agencies could sell their agency to clients. What I did was go down to the magazine stores on 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue where you could get old copies of Photography Annual. I cut out the best photographs, figuring I might as well have the best photographers working for me, wrote appropriate headlines to go with them, signed them JDF, and sent them to an agency called Daniel and Charles. Finally Daniel Karsh, the head of the company, said to his secretary, “Who the hell is this JDF and what does he want?”

  I got in to see him.

  “I’m going to give you a chance,” Karsh said.

  “You don’t have to pay me,” I told him. “All I need is a telephone so I can call my wife.”

  “No, I feel obligated to give you a token salary of fifty-two hundred dollars a year. Is that okay?”

  I bit my lip. “It’s okay.”

  “Are you sure it’s enough?”

  “Yes, it’s fine.”

  I went down the elevator, walked out in front of 185 Madison Avenue, and let out a gigantic scr
eam. It was the most any Della Femina in history had ever made.

  For the first six months that I worked at Daniel and Charles, I didn’t read a magazine. I didn’t want to lose the edge, whatever I had that was fresh. The first ad I did was for Hahn Brothers Movers. It appeared in the New Yorker. The headline said “‘Oops!’—We haven’t had cause to use this word in thirty years. We use other words, words like ‘Watch that cabinet,’ ‘Be careful with that table,’ ‘There’s been more padding on that painting.’ As a result of these words, we never said ‘Oops.’ We won’t either. Yet we charge no more than moving firms who advertise in less sophisticated magazines.”

  Within a year, I was a copy chief. I kept getting raises, and then I became almost like the son of Charles Goldschmidt, one of the partners. It got to the point where I could do no wrong. I wanted to get more out of the job than being the favorite. So I left.

  This was the time of the creative revolution, the big change that took place in the advertising industry in the fifties, early sixties, when young men coming out of the army started to establish themselves. It was a changing of the guard. Prior to that, advertising was a Wasp business. If you were Italian they let you work in the production department. I remember going for a job at J. Walter Thompson, and the man looked at my little portfolio and said, “Well, you’re very good. You could probably get a job here but they don’t want to work with people like you.” It took a few years before I understood what he meant.

  If you were Jewish, the only accounts you were allowed to have were garment industry accounts. Grey was the first agency that broke away from that. Then a writer named Bill Bernbach spun off with two guys, Max Dane and Ned Doyle. Dane and Bernbach were Jewish; Doyle was Irish. They produced intelligent advertising, as opposed to singing cigarette packs and such that treated people as if they were dumb. They had a sophisticated sense of humor. At first the old agencies made fun of Doyle, Dane, and Bernbach. But as this new firm took account after account away from them, they realized that this was a real thing. By the time they figured it out, it was too late.