A landmark food business in the Italian Market has closed after a century

P&F Giordano Fruit & Produce, a fixture in South Philadelphia’s Italian Market for a century, has closed pending a sale of the property at Ninth Street and Washington Avenue.

The closing late last week, which leaves all four corners of the landmark intersection vacant, is a sign of the times, said John Giordano, a grandson of founders Paul and Frances Giordano, who owns the parcel of five buildings with his brothers Wally and Gene.

The produce business has changed with competition from supermarkets and other retailers, of course, but more recently has suffered with the rise of delivery, said John Giordano, 64, who started working in the store at age 5 when he got home from kindergarten.

“Our business has moved into wholesale — pizza places, restaurants, and everything like that,” Giordano said Saturday, as he and workers cleaned out the property, setting out boxes of bric-a-brac salvaged from an upstairs apartment to offer to passersby. The garage doors were rolled down, unheard-of on a Saturday.

He said the property would go to settlement in the coming weeks. He did not disclose the identity of the buyers and said he was not sure of their plans.

Giordano said he and his son John III would move to the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market in South Philadelphia. He said his brother Gene would continue his wholesale business out of nearby Anastasio Produce, while Wally would retire.

Giordano said his grandparents, Sicilian immigrants Paul and Frances Giordano, came into the property through a brother of Paul Giordano who lied about his age to enlist in World War I at age 16. After the brother was killed in action, the family bought the building with proceeds from a life insurance policy, he said.

The Giordanos raised their 13 children amid the storied curb market, a bustling lineup of storefronts fronted by wooden carts and — on cold days — flaming barrels to warm the workers.

“Everybody worked,” John Giordano said. One of his earliest memories was at age 5 when he didn’t tell his father that he was home from school. “He yelled at me. ‘You make sure you tell me you’re back,’” Giordano said. “I’ll always remember that.”

As the business grew, the family bought adjoining properties along Washington Avenue to include cold storage and garage bays. Another of the founder’s brothers owned a store two doors away on Ninth Street.

In its heyday, Giordano’s, like other nearby businesses, operated nearly around the clock, with the women of the family not only working the stand but also preparing buffets of food upstairs for other workers.

Each overnight, someone would stand watch over the store, setting up a pushcart, a portable TV, and a chair outside. In the 1980s, many locals can remember Joe Giordano, a son of the founders who ran the store with brothers John and Paul until his 1994 death, sitting out front wearing his customary hat.

Sometimes a brother, Vince Giordano, known as Fatty, would cover the shift because he worked nights elsewhere and said he was awake anyway.

When he was a kid, John Giordano recalled, his grandmother, who lived upstairs, worked the register into her 80s, and died in 1986, drove her 1960 Cadillac to daily Mass at St. Paul’s three blocks away.

Giordano’s fit right into Ninth Street’s grittiness. The landmark corner hosted political candidates seeking photo ops and blue-collar votes.

Hollywood called over the years, immortalizing the market when a gray-sweatsuited, Chuck Taylored Sylvester Stallone ran through the daily tumult on his way to the Art Museum for the first two Rocky movies in the 1970s. The street turned up on screen in 2005’s In Her Shoes and on the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Giordano’s itself found screen time in the 1983 movie Trading Places and the sixth Rocky film — 2006’s Rocky Balboa.

Far from a set piece, the market was and is still a shopping district. When the Italian immigrants who had begun settling in the neighborhood in the late 19th century began moving out, the complement of vendors became mainly immigrants from Latin American and Asian countries establishing their own foothold in America. Restaurants have supplanted many of the food and dry-goods stores.

Over the years, Giordano descendants owned many properties nearby, including the triangle at Eighth and Washington that housed the now-shuttered Captain Jesse G’s Crab. Family members also owned a large property across from Giordano’s, on the southeast corner of Ninth and Washington, that was a Carvel ice cream shop for a time and later was leased to Anastasi Seafood, and eventually was sold. The building was razed in 2022 for a planned commercial-residential development that has not materialized. Meanwhile, Anastasi Seafood moved to 1039 S. Ninth Street, next to the now-closed Giordano’s store.

One by one, the Giordanos left the produce business, many choosing professions that did not follow a vendor’s often ungodly schedule. (For years, weddings were scheduled on Sundays when most of the family had a day off.)

Paul Giordano & Sons in the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market, owned by another branch of the third generation, recently closed.

There is a fourth generation with a thriving wholesale business: Marcello Giordano, 53, who owns Giordano Garden Groceries on South Front Street, as well as a 104-acre blueberry farm in Hammonton, N.J.

Dennis Mackin, who has worked at the nearby kitchen supply store Fante’s for 15 years, paused Saturday morning at the sight of Giordano’s shuttered garage doors. “Tragic,” he said of the closing. “It’s just one more corner that is going to be derelict.

“Change isn’t always bad, but this one is very sad after a hundred years.”

City Councilmember Mark Squilla, told of the closing, acknowledged the changing times. “Hopefully whoever’s buying it is interested in keeping the retail and making sure that it’s aligned with the market values,” he said.