Grant Park Grocery & Market

Grant Park Grocery and Market, NE 33rd and Knott, about 1933. Photo courtesy of Jerry Hoffelner. The man in the first row, second from the right with the blue “x” penned onto his apron, is Jerry’s dad, George Hoffelner. The other men have yet to be identified. Can you help?

I’m researching a very old house near 29th and Knott. One of the many people who lived in the house over the years worked for a while at the Grant Park Grocery and Market, which we know today as the Family Medical Group office on the southwest corner of NE 33rd and Knott.

The image above, taken about 1933, shows the grocery staff decked out in their white aprons ready for action. Like many small stores, these guys often delivered the groceries direct to your door…an idea recently picked up on by some of the modern mega-grocery stores.

This image is taken on the east face of the building (facing 33rd). The original entrance for the market was not on the diagonal at the corner like it is today, though it seems there was always an entry there. My hunch is that was the entry to the pharmacy and fountain that used to be there. The grocery business was owned and operated by Ernest Bjorklund. Next time you are stopped at the light there, have a good look at this interesting building and tip your hat to Mr. Bjorklund and his squad of helpful grocery clerks.

I’m looking for any help with memories, stories, photos or information about either the Grant Park Market or the pharmacy and fountain.

Here’s a shot of that same spot today. The door appears to be an “emergency exit” today. The graceful lights are gone, as is the cool curved doorway and the sidewalk ramp leading to the door (it’s now just part of the garden bed).

 

When Research Pays Off

 

The images here on the blog resulted from research I’ve done on my own house and stemmed from a front porch remodeling project we had in mind. In the 1940s, After 30 years of exposure and wear-and-tear, the family living here decided to remodel their deteriorating front porch. They removed the columns and poured a concrete deck. Then they enclosed it with casement windows and turned it into a sun porch. When we moved in in the late 1980s, it was pretty much charm free. Our detective work on the reconstruction showed the ghosts of some early columns and other features, but we had to use our imaginations to guess at what it looked like originally. That is, until old house research really paid off.

I had been looking for members of the family who lived in our house (one single family was here from 1912 until 1959, which is a good long time for one family to be in the house…we were lucky in that). I was also fortunate to find the little boy who grew up here…he was in his 90s when I found him. In addition to sharing all kinds of stories about the house and the neighborhood, he put me on to a bunch of photographs of the house from the teens and early 1920s. Jackpot! We couldn’t believe our eyes. We were generally right about the columns, but the idea of the extended porch, with its false pedastal corners, was well beyond our imaginations.

So, we sat down at the drawing board, old photos in hand, and did some scaling of the ghost porch using measurements of house parts visible then and still here today. And then we found a very talented and patient carpenter to put it all back together.

After a little landscaping and reconstruction of some long-gone sidewalks, I’m confident that the family who moved in those long years ago would clearly recognize the place today.