More Mom and Pops From the Past

Why do the neighborhood stores of our childhood have such a hold on us? I clearly remember the homey feel of Jake’s market on Russell Street, the watchful eye of Mr. Zagoren at Ridge Road market, the bright and wide aisles of West Side Market, and the taste of the ham and cheese grinders from Cross Street Market. 

Based on reader emails and comments, many other local folks feel the same way. 

This week I’ll focus on the stores on South Main Street between Warwick Street and Highland Avenue.

Wilcox, Crittenden & Company, once the largest manufacturer of marine hardware in the world, employed hundreds of people at its mills on South Main Street beginning in 1847. A thriving community developed in the multi-family homes on the neighboring streets of Warwick and Oak Streets and Burr Avenue. Even though it seems close to the center of town, the immediate neighborhood provided most of what the employees and their families needed.

Warwick Street was the location of the first neighborhood store outside of downtown, which developed at about the same time as the first stores on East Main Street in South Farms, which was also associated with a large mill complex (and a topic of next week’s column). 

Charles Schondorf owned the first store on Warwick Street, identified in the 1875 Middletown city directory. It was located near or at the intersection of South Main Street on the first floor of the home he shared with his wife Miriah and their two small children, Karl and Eugene. Schondorf was born in New York to parents who had migrated from Germany. He was just 25 years old when he opened the store that catered to the needs of the factory families.

When Charles died in 1894, his son Eugene took over the store, with the help of his mother, when he was barely 17 years old. By that time there was a bit of competition in the neighborhood.

Mrs. Anna E. Burkholz took a stab at operating a neighborhood grocery store on Warwick Street for a few years in the 1880s, while her husband worked as a night watchman. In the 1890s, David R. Brownlow traded in his job as a stone dealer to open a store in his house on Warwick Street.

J. Henry Wiese opened a successful store at the corner of Warwick and South Main between 1895 and 1900. A native of Germany, Wiese came to the U.S. in 1873 and naturalized soon thereafter. He lived on Warwick Street with his wife Sophie and their children Burton and Ruth, which stood next door to the Schondorf’s store.

By 1910, the Wiese store was in competition with the grocery run by Frederick A. Clarke, under the name of Nichols and Clarke.  By 1920, Clarke was the sole proprietor of his place at the corner of South Main and Warwick Streets.  Except for a few years when Abraham Blumer operated a grocery midway down Warwick in the 1920s, Clarke was the sole survivor, closing in 1953.

Frederick A. Clarke lived on Oak Street with his family and made the store at the intersection a local landmark for many years. Beginning in the late 1920s, his son, Robert, helped run the store. The store closed in 1953, after more than 40 years in operation, when Frederick Clarke, at the age of 72, took his own life in the office of the store.

Further south on South Main Street, Benjamin F. Turner worked as a clerk in his grandfather’s store beginning in about 1875 on the Durham Road. Eventually he took over the grocery, which stood on the west side of the road, between Pameacha Avenue and Farm Hill Road until about 1925.  Benjamin F. Turner was also the Grandmaster of the Connecticut’s Free Masons beginning in 1907.

Julius Scherp was another grocer on the east side of South Main between Hunting Hill Avenue and Lake Street during the first three decades of the twenthieth century.

The Economy Grocery Store is a well-remembered establishment on South Main, near Warwick, opening before 1930. It had three other branches in town at East Main, Pearl, and North High Streets.

Herman Curkin ran the Community Market on South Main after moving it from its original location on East Main Street. It was located, I believe, on the east side of the South Main opposite the head of Pameacha Avenue, during the 1940s and into the 1970s.

O’Connor’s Store, which was open for a short time in the 1940s, was located at the northeast corner of Lake and South Main Street.

Even further south, near Highland Avenue, in the area of town known as “Zoar,” at least one store opened to cater to the Wilcox Lock Company employees there. Andrew Lenz opened a small place before 1915 at the corner of Highland Avenue, about where the Pizza Palace plaza now stands.

By the 1970s, Cumberland Farms and Grand Union had joined the fray and signaled the end of the neighborhood stores for the South Main Street area. All that remains as evidence are houses or apartments that have a faint commercial appearance, older commercial buildings that we barely notice when we drive by, and the locations of current business that were often built on the site of former stores.

It is hard to locate photographs of these old stores. News about them rarely made it into the paper, and people rarely photographed the simple places that they took for granted in their daily lives. I hope that readers out there might have some photographs and can post them on the Patch site.

I’ve included current photographs of places that housed some of the old stores, and pictures of ones that appear to me to be former commercial buildings. I am hoping you can match them up with stores mentioned in the column! Please feel free to correct me if I made errors in store locations.

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