Africa In A Bottle

This is the South side of Baltimore Avenue between 45th and Melville Streets. The row was built at some point between 1910 and 1925 on the former Twaddell family property. Since around 1989 when I arrived in this neighborhood, immigrants from Africa have been settling here and starting businesses. They are either from Eritrea-Ethiopia or from West Africa, but never from North Africa or areas in the Southern part of the continent. I remember things about each of the store fronts.

At far left, corner of Melville, is a now-empty insurance & state motor vehicle service office. That place operated for many years but then the need for such a store ceased to exist. Pennsylvania has many odd laws and procedures, or at least odd to me, being originally from New York.

Next is a very new African-French restaurant which has a good reputation. The French refers to the language, not the food. There have been at least two West African eateries before it there, but this is different because it's set up more like a diner. I have not tried the food yet, but I intend to. Generally speaking the West African cuisine is less popular among Whites than Ethiopian, and the two are totally different from one another, having not a single recipe in common.

Next is the Nigerian grocery store where I buy my pre-paid caling cards. They stock various kinds of dried fish and "smokies" (chunks of goat meat with the skin still attached and where the fur was burned off with a torch), and plantains, okra, and many foods for which I know neither name nor usage after all these years. There are DVDs from the home country as well, and kitchen gadgets, and hats, and whatever one needs to feel at home in a West African way. The owner is a nice fellow.

Next in the row, with its steel barrier down, is the W. E. B. DuBois Bookstore. It is open about three evenings per year (I'm not kidding) and aproximately nobody ever buys any books there. No, they don't sell books on line. During the later years of the Cold War, it was Philadelphia's Communist Party anchor, but the old couple who lived above the store died many years ago and it would take some actual research to determine what the surviving believers of state communism are thinking and what, if anything, they're doing. This place is the butt of many anarchist jokes.

Next is the Queen of Sheba Restaurant & Bar. Their Ethiopian food is very good and they serve it later than the other nearby restaurants. This is also where a karaoke revival began about five years ago, led by a fellow I know. But I avoid the place now and long since. Pardon me if I seem prudish but I don't like to be approached by prostitutes, and that's happened to me more than once there.

Then you'll see an alley and finally a low building with a variety store, a tiny cafe, and a boutique. When I arrived these were a doctor's office, a shoe repair & key-making shop, and a laundromat. I used to go to the shoe place and the laundry all the time. Now I have no idea what's what in the variety store, the cafe has preposterously slow and confused service, and the boutique is uninteresting and overpriced.

That brings us to the corner at the end of my street. Now you know all about a short row of stores in a far-away neighborhood. Be well!