Washington Avenue: changing owners and languages

At the northeast corner of Ninth Street and Washington Avenue, garage doors are closed beneath a long, faded awning. Until the end of July twenty twenty-five, Giordano's Produce sold fruit and vegetables here. The shop opened in nineteen twenty-one and lasted for more than a century.

According to the family story told by John Giordano, the founders' grandson, the money for this building came after the death of his great-uncle. Paul Giordano's brother added years to his age, enlisted in the army at sixteen, and died in World War I. The insurance payout allowed his relatives to buy the corner house. Sicilian immigrants Paul and Frances Giordano set up a business here that was meant to support their family.

The Giordanos had thirteen children, and the shop determined the routine of the entire household. Frances lived upstairs and stood at the cash register until well into her eighties. The women sold goods downstairs, then went upstairs to cook food for relatives and workers. At night, one of the sons kept watch over the merchandise with an armchair and a portable television. Their grandson John began helping at five: after returning from kindergarten, he had to tell his father at once that he was ready to work. Even family weddings were scheduled for Sunday—the only day when most vendors could leave Ninth Street.

Paul and Frances gradually bought the adjoining buildings along Washington Avenue. Behind today’s gates were refrigerators and garages: the street counter needed a whole row of storage spaces. But the children and grandchildren increasingly chose jobs without night watches and three o’clock in the morning wake-ups. Customers moved to supermarkets and delivery, while Giordano's Produce shifted toward wholesale. In the third generation, Wally Giordano decided to retire, John and his son moved their work to the wholesale produce market, and Gene continued deliveries from a neighboring store. The brothers closed and sold the corner shop.

That same warehouse development brought other merchants to Washington Avenue. As factories and freight businesses closed in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, large, relatively inexpensive spaces along the avenue stood empty. In the nineteen nineties, entrepreneurs from the Vietnamese community bought them and divided them into supermarkets, restaurants, bakeries, and small services. Signs in Vietnamese, Chinese, and English appeared above the former warehouses.

Three blocks from here, baker Le Vo and his daughter Thi Nguyen chose one such space. Le Vo had the family nickname Ba Le—“third Le,” based on his place among the children. In Saigon, he learned to bake baguettes from a French chef and sold bread with meat, herbs, and pickled vegetables from carts. In nineteen ninety-eight, the father helped his daughter open Philadelphia’s Ba Le Bakery in a former warehouse between Sixth and Seventh Streets.

Three months later, Thi met her future husband, Harry Tran. By day, he advised banks preparing for the computer transition to the year two thousand, and by night he served customers at the bakery. That came to about one hundred working hours a week. Once, Harry came to at a desk in a State of Delaware office and could not remember how he had gotten there. The next day, he quit the bank and, together with Thi, focused on the bakery. They gave up table service and placed their bet on takeout food and their own bread. Ba Le Bakery drew Vietnamese people traveling around the Northeast, then local customers and restaurants that needed its baguettes.

In twenty twenty-four, Victor Nguyen, Le Vo’s grandson, took over the bakery. He had started there as a teenager, making sausages. Now a new Ba Le sign with the Eiffel Tower hangs above the former warehouse. Here, at the corner of Ninth Street, the Giordano name can still be read on the faded awning, but the gates beneath it are closed.