Urban Grocery: A Personal Experiment (Patreon)

Wrote this on Friday. Figured I'd run it today in place of a journal.

“This is where we walked, swam / hunted, danced, and sang / take a picture here / take a souvenir”

— R.E.M., “Cuyahoga”

This is Chas. Urban Groceries & Meats at 6626 Union Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, where at least three generations of my family worked and lived. I don’t know if my third great grandfather Matej lived here. As far as I know, he was retired by the time the store opened, but he may well have stayed upstairs in the living quarters with the rest of his family.

Matej’s son Karl, the “Chas.” of Chas. Urban Groceries & Meats, is standing in the far left-hand corner, marked “1”. His wife Anastasia, or “Stazi,” stands to his right, marked “2.” I don’t recognize “3,” but their son Charlie is 4, and I believe Libbie Ruth is marked 5.

The whole family lived upstairs in this store for the better half of a century. Here they pose with laborers to show off their produce. When I was growing up, I thought they were displaying chickens in the window. One day my “aunt” Alma Libbie Winkle (actually my first cousin twice removed), who worked in the store when she was a little girl, came over, saw the picture, and told us those were actually rabbits.

The Urban moved to 6626 Union Avenue at some point between 1900 and 1910. Their store closed around 1948, shortly after the death of Anastasia, who ran the store for decades. The building was torn down too. According to Google Maps, my Czech immigrant family's legacy is some patches of dirt on a green lawn in Cleveland.

Union Avenue was a prosperous area for Cleveland’s community of Czech immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a street of commerce in “Little Bohemia,” the most prosperous Bohemians settlement in Cleveland.

Many Czechs went to work for John D. Rockefeller’s oil company. Rockefeller’s oil may well have polluted the Cuyahoga River, which infamously caught on fire and prompted the passing of the Clean Water Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Urban lived two miles away from the Cuyahoga River. They probably saw the Cuyahoga burning in 1883 and 1887[1].

Cleveland was a better option for the family. My double-great grandparents emigrated from Bohemia in the 1880s, amid a wave of Czech peasants seeking more stable living conditions than those afforded by Czechia under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Cleveland, an economic hub near the Great Lakes and the Midwest, was a buffer for many immigrants on their way to Nebraska, Iowa, or Wisconsin. Many Czech immigrants, however, opted to stay there. By 1870, nearly 700 Czech families lived in Cleveland. 

Karl, who grew up in the Bohemian village of Dobrichov, arrived in Baltimore in June 1880, aged 22, on the ship Berlin. He picked up work as a grocer quickly, supporting Anastasia and their six children in Cleveland Ward 25 and then Ward 17. He died in 1916, two months before his father Matej passed.

Great grandma Anastasia, whose name is conversely given as “Annastazia,” “Anastyzia,” “Stasi,” “Stazi,” “Anna,” and “Stella,” is something of a family legend. As Anastasia Princ, she emigrated from Blatna, South Bohemia, at the age of 14 or 15, possibly on her own. At age 16, she married the 26-year-old Karl, quite illegally — their marriage certificate falsely states that she has turned 18 years old. By age 18, she was a mother.

Anastasia raised her children Bertha, Charlie, Libbie, Bessie, and my great-grandfather George, along with Nettie Krucky, Karl’s niece from Texas who was presumably orphaned. At 48, she suffered her husband’s death, and started running Chas. Urban Groceries & Meats herself, a fact attested by my Aunt Alma’s obituary, which refers to “her beloved grandmother’s Urban Grocery store on Union Avenue.”

I don’t know many details of Anastasia’s life. She would have been around during the 1915 Czech-Slovak Cleveland Agreement, which led to her home country gaining independence and becoming Czechoslovakia. In her later years, the Nazis invaded her home country. By the time Anastasia died in 1945, possible upstairs in her store, her adopted country had restricted immigration, quenching a flood of Czech refugees searching for a roof to crouch under.

Nobody’s written down Anastasia’s feelings about Czechia or politics or faith (the latter of which was a point of diversity among Czech immigrants anyway). The Urbans have never taken to talking about their feelings. Karl and Anastasia christened at least one of their children, but there’s otherwise little indication whether they had faith. Perhaps they needed some to survive.

Urban Grocery survived the Great Depression. It kept a couple generations of Czechs and their children safe while their distant relatives died horrifically. When the lady who ran the store died, that was it. Maybe Grandma Stazi was more powerful than the Great Depression. It took more than a burning river and two world wars to take down Urban Grocery.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130122050545/http://law.cwru.edu/faculty/adler_jonathan/publications/fables_of_the_cuyahoga.pdf