CLEVELAND, Ohio — I had no hint the grocery on Shaw Avenue was going to close. Under various names, the store had been there all my life. When my father moved our family into a house on East 126th Street in the ’60s, a tiny A&P store sat on the site.
A decade or so later, the A&P had disappeared, as had an auto dealership on the corner of East 125th and Shaw. (No other dealership replaced it.) Sure, the A&P had shut its doors, but another grocery filled its space before a closed-for-business sign popped up.
At the time, the Glenville neighborhood was transitioning from Jewish to Black, and I suppose a chain like A&P didn’t see the worth of sticking around to serve the changing demographics. Yet I don’t remember ever seeing the storefront unoccupied…