The Forthcoming Closure of Red Apple, One of Seattle's Few Black-Loved Supermarkets by Charles Mudede G entrification is never a simple matter. You can argue that it simply removes poor people from a neighborhood and replaces them with those in the middle and upper classes. But the process itself is often motivated by good intentions or progressive ideas. The future plans of the Promenade 23 shopping center, located on 23rd Avenue and South Jackson Street, offer an excellent example of such good intentions. When Paul Allen bought the shopping center from Weingarten Realty this spring for $30.9 million, many predicted that a good number of the businesses there, many of them small businesses owned by black Americans, were going to go. Six months later, it looks like one of those businesses will be the supermarket, Red Apple, which has served the neighborhood, a predominantly black community, for over 25 years. To this day, the Red Apple (which is a regional supermarket chain) in Promenade 23 is one of the few places in this town that sells the parts of animals most whites do not usually buy or eat: pig ears, the stomachs of cows, the sheer skins of chickens. This business does not appear to be in the future that Paul Allen's company, Vulcan, has in mind. "Yeah, we were told it's over and we'll have to move out of here by June," explained an employee to me, "and between then and now, we are pretty much going month to month. Everyone
All Related | More on Seattle |
from Breaking News http://ift.tt/2bEEqyC
No comments:
Post a Comment