From the May 11, 2001 print edition
It's the last one, the last vestige of a long tradition of neighborhood grocery stores in Schenectady's historic Stockade district.
Part convenience store, part grocery, deli, and vital social hub, Arthur's Food Market is all that's left in a neighborhood once dotted with corner stores catering to the mostly blue-collar families who lived there.
Original proprietor Arthur Polachek, 81, remembers a time when he competed with four other stores on the same block at his location on North Ferry Street.
His son, Pete, runs the place now, but the elder Polachek still works about four hours a day, opening the store at 7 every morning.
"It probably is good for me to work every day. I enjoy coming down to the store. I'd be lost without it," he said.
Since it opened in 1945, the store has had to adapt to the changing needs of a neighborhood that has grown younger and more diverse, with many professionals and a large gay community, Pete Polachek said.
The Stockade, founded in 1661, became the first historic district in the state in 1962. The accompanying zoning laws that were intended to preserve the area no doubt helped give Arthur's the monopoly it currently enjoys.
"I don't think the kids want to take it over. The hours are incredible," Pete Polachek said of the other stores that have closed down over the years.
Because of the zoning laws, new establishments were not allowed to reopen, and neither would Arthur's if it were to close down for more than a year, Pete Polachek said.
He hopes to prevent the store from meeting the same fate by turning it over to his daughter, Tiffany, when he eventually retires. Even with a monopoly in the neighborhood, the store strives for personal service, reasonable prices and a more
The store stocks a modest but fresh-looking supply of produce that Pete says is bought in Utica because large distributors don't really cater to a store his size.
"We're bigger than a convenience store, but we're smaller than a supermarket. We're a size store that doesn't exist anymore," Pete said.
A casual survey of the inventory reveals a surprising variety of goods at prices that don't seem outrageously higher than the large grocery chains.
"We don't gouge people, mostly because it's good for business," Pete Polachek said. He credits good will in the community for the store never having been held up or seriously vandalized in its entire history.
One customer, Mike Karstetter, said that he is a vegetarian and comes to Arthur's because most other convenience stores don't sell the food he likes to eat.
"This one has better variety," said Karstetter, who smiles at being caught buying beef stew.
In 1999, the store completed a renovation that gave the interior a brighter, more open atmosphere. Pete visited coffee shops in Saratoga Springs and Albany for ideas on the redesign, which included new wood flooring and opening up the large storefront windows that had previously been covered with beer containers.
On a recent weeknight, the store is busy with customers wandering in to buy a sandwich, a can of chili, a roll of toilet paper. For most of them, the store seems to be more than just a place to buy a few things and leave.
Pete knows most of their names and takes time to catch up on the soap operas of their lives. They come and go, engaging Pete in a running conversation that won't be over when they go out the door.
A clearly distraught woman comes in to buy a newspaper, hoping unsuccessfully to find a story on the death of punk rock legend Joey Ramone. She lingers and talks, and then shuffles out sadly, looking as if an era is closing on her life.
A young man enters and asks to cash a personal check and Pete Polachek obliges, saying nothing when the man leaves without buying anything.
The store doesn't sell lottery tickets or accept credit cards, but regular customers are able to run a tab, which Pete Polachek keeps track of using an informal-looking system of index cards.
Watching him hold court from behind a cash register that sits before a non-functioning fireplace, it's not hard to visualize a long list of predecessors who have stood in the same spot over hundreds of years, nodding and offering advice as they rang up bags of flour or jugs of molasses.
Pete said a neighborhood grocery has operated continually on the spot since 1795.
To Albert Relyea, a local artist who chooses to display exclusively at the store, there's a simple reason he and so many others are loyal customers.
"He's my friend. He's a good guy. I go in there to talk to him, and that's it."