Expanding on that a little - people living in small urban apartments just basically have less stuff. It kinda works with the old saw - your stuff expands to fill the space you have.
I used to live near the corner of 1st av and 89th in Manhattan. Within a reasonable walking distance are 2 Gristedes, a Fairway, Whole Foods, Key Food and a C-Town.
I get the map covering most of the center of Manhattan, but it only shows grocery stores on the west side, so it’s a quirk in Google Maps that may depend on your history.
Many of the convenience stores in NYC are also grocery stores. They pack as much as they can into limited space. They have narrow aisles and shelves that go to the ceiling. They may not have as many varieties of each product as a large grocery store, but pretty much any product you need you can get. Most people just buy one or two grocery bags at a time. When the grocery store is just a few minutes walk away, you don’t need to keep weeks worth of food at home.
My grandmother used to live on the corner of 2nd Ave and 6th Street in NYC; there was an IGA right across the avenue from her, which was convenient. I just Google Mapped it, but it looks like it’s gone. Also looks like the neighborhood is one big mass of construction and closed-down stores, which is sad.
Before the pandemic we stayed for a month in Yorkville on the East Side, and there were plenty of small grocery stores within easy walking distance. Not bodegas, but chain groceries. They were small relative to a supermarket, with narrow aisles.
I grew up in Queens, and the groceries we went to had plenty of parking and were as big as the ones here in California.
In small apartments you don’t have room to store a whole lot of groceries.
This is not unique to New York. Every time we have spent extended stays in large crowded cities (London, Hong Kong, Munich) the grocery store situation has been similar - they are there, but they might not be so obvious; might be several floors; might be mostly underground; and geared towards modest sized purchases.
me too.
When i lived in Manhattan, there was a small grocery store in the basement of our apartment building. We bought a lot of our groceries there. It had no storefront, just a door. And of course no parking.
There were larger markets within a few blocks on every direction. The fairways to our South had much better fruit and a much larger selection of food than the little shop on the basement. There was a somewhat traditional supermarket to our North, in Harlem, but it had outdated groceries and sometimes spoiled meat. When i read about how black areas were underserved in retail i thought about that horrible (and overpriced) grocery. But there was a really good bakery near it. And of course lots of specialty stores, and lots of cheap restaurants.
Related question–are there any Wal-Mart stores in New York City?
Nope. Closest would be New Jersey or Valley Stream. IIRC years ago they were talking of having a smaller one in Times Square but that never happened.
When I lived in Manhattan (Harlem, near Columbia) there were at least three Key Food supermarkets within walking distance. In Brooklyn (Park Slope) there were a number of different supermarkets. A&P and Key Food for sure, but several others whose names I can’t remember.
When I lived in Kansas City’s tony Country Club Plaza neighborhood, the apartment building next to mine had a two level grocery store in the ground floor and basement. It was mighty expensive and had a limited selection. The stores in New York were way bigger. Maybe in Lower Manhattan there are fewer full size grocery stores, but even the last time I was in Chinatown there were several Asian supermarkets that were a good size.
How does a small store with just a door receive its deliveries? Is there a loading dock facing an alley in the back? Do delivery trucks just have to double-park in the street and somebody hand-carries stuff in?
I lived around the corner from this grocery store on Amsterdam and 120th for several years. No loading dock or alleyway. It’s tiny and crowded, and deliveries coming in weren’t huge. I remember trucks parking there very late at night and some stuff would go down a hatch in the sidewalk.
With space being a premium in Manhattan there are very few alleys. In movies when they film a Manhattan alley it’s either not on the island or it’s Cortlandt Alley.
Yeah, no alley. Like gkster described, there was a hatch in the sidewalk that could be opened for deliveries. I think it had a ramp suitable for handtrucks. And the place was small, so most deliveries were just a few boxes, I’d guess.
Did you know that 18 wheeler trucks aren’t even allowed in Manhattan? That’s one of the reasons few major grocery chains operate there – they are set up to depend on big truckloads of stuff, and that just doesn’t work. All the deliveries come in smaller trucks or vans.
I see that too, I assume it’s because the map link is coded that your position is on the west side of Central Park near 82nd, the blue pin. The map is showing you nearby groceterias that don’t require you to cross the park. (Maybe Google thinks it’s dangerous. Or Google thinks you are lazy.) So it shows you stores a long way north or south but not stuff immediately across the park; and the range limit is the top and bottom of the park, so nothing below 59th?
Or maybe somehow Google Maps is aware of the great Upper East Side / Upper West Side divide? I remember reading Judith Krantz’s Mistral’s Daughter in the mid 1980s and she talks about people who live on the Upper East Side rarely venturing to the Upper West, and vice-versa. I thought that was strange until I lived on the Upper West Side myself. It’s easier and faster to go north-south by subway, which I often did, compared to crossing the park which means a slow bus.
Did anybody not living in the building have access or was the store’s clientele strictly building dwellers?
An apartment complex by me has a coffee shop in one of the ground floor spaces with very limited parking – a couple parallel spots on the main street – but there are dozens of apartment homes in the complex and a boutique hotel in the next block to draw upon.
That’s so weird, no idea why when I click it it shows me stores on the east side.