This is the first week of my walking tour of the interesting small street markets and neighborhood stores in Southeast Seattle.
The south end is just brimming with unique and interesting small stores that can offer you a lot more, and charge you much less, plus offering a greatly broadening retail experience, if you just let yourself discover them.
Transitioning to a small mart future does require some changes in your habits, and maybe a little nurturing by city hall. It could become a really strong and legible part of the South End's signature style as the new neighborhoods emerge along the valley's rail transit corridor. The hard part is to manage the change at both the personal and the municipal levels and to actively see to it that the outcome goes the right way.
Low cost food retailers, offering every level of quality, have prospered in the southeast part of the city partly because these are some of the oldest neighborhoods in Seattle. Some retail relics, representing the very best ideas of the past, still work well here.
But interesting and efficient retailers have also emerged anew, because we are host to some of America's newest citizens who have brought with them familiar ideas that have humanized and enriched our streets. That diversity has enriched our Southeast Seattle community with a long list of specialized, local, smaller and often much less formally housed markets.
Collectively they can provide everything you need, often much closer to home and at prices that, if you are new to shopping with these retailers, you simply may not believe are possible.
Shopping in a new way with the independent small market retailers of the South End offers a shopping experience that rivals the Pike Place Market for interest, and far exceeds it in the diversity of what is offered. There is the informality of our wonderful crossroad street markets, like Fou Lee's at the intersection of Beacon Avenue South and Colombian Way. There you can buy, not only fresh produce, but also fresh and fish, pork, beef and chicken, and an interesting array of Asian and American canned, packaged and hot ready to eat goods.
Fou Lee's has a surprising amount of merchandise sprawling across the pavement to the sidewalk housed under temporary canvas and metal shelters. It also has a similarly surprising amount of convenient parking nearby in the nearby medians and on the broad shoulders of Colombian Way. It is part of one of the area's several interesting small neighborhood market nodes.
The crossroads village at Beacon Avenue South and Columbian Way includes all the necessities: a dry cleaner, a gas station with the usual pop/beer potato chips and candy store attached and the Seattle Super Market, which keeps grocery competition fierce, and prices at this location startlingly low. In the block or so of this intersection you will find a bakery, a neighborhood bar, and the Koffee Korner restaurant, maybe Seattle's best breakfast joint.
In this one short block, you can also pick up some antiques, or a new set of custom-made golf clubs, or even more deli food and barbecue.
A quarter mile west you'll find McPherson's, one of the very best street produce and flower markets in South Seattle. You can't miss it at the confluence of Columbian Way and 15th Avenue South. This market is a long-standing Beacon Hill landmark, and it is a neighborhood produce shopping treasure.
Shop Fou Lee, Seattle Super Market and McPhearson's instead of where you normally go and compare the price and experience. You can fill your bags with everything you need to prepare the best cuisine of many nations with out looking beyond these few small neighborhood markets.
They are just a tiny sample of the diversity of shopping experiences available in the wonderful array of small and specialized ethnic markets of South Seattle.
During a quick jaunt south I took inventory of small but useful neighborhood markets. For example, the TW Young Market, a vest pocket supermarket further south in the 7100 block of Beacon Avenue South. Also, a little farther on to the south at Aloha, I found the still smaller Aloha market, which offers the standard pop, beer, and late night necessities. It sits in an old brick neighborhood landmark of a grocery store building, complete with a little off street parking and a residence for the storekeeper over the store.
There are many of these limited inventory, neighborhood retailers hanging on, such as Victory Grocery at South Kenyon and Renton Avenue South farther down in the valley.
Their owners scratch out a living, making sure you are never far from a quart of milk and six pack of beer, a candy bar, dog food, paper towels, a bottle of pop, or a bag of potato chips. In doing so these stores make an important contribution to lessening the length and frequency of vehicle trips you make, saving fuel and time.
By attracting and serving a very local clientele, they are a catalyst in the formation of social capital, by creating a tiny neighborhood pedestrian vortex, which builds community and humanizes the scale of neighborhood life in the South End.
Pick up next weeks edition for the final installment of "Big Box Blues."
Would you like to send a comment to George Robertson? Drop him an e-mail at editor@sdistrictjournal.com.
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