And so on. It's not just trash-phobic suburbanites who dump on the Ninth Street Market. The locals do a pretty good number themselves: They're in perpetual fret over its identity (Is it going too "Mexican"?) and its viability (Whole Foods is barely two blocks north, and weekly farm markets have popped up like chanterelles).
The question of its very relevance - after 100 years of ebb and flow - is not beyond intense discussion, if you bring it up, over a cappuccino at Anthony's, or next to the walk-ins stacked with romaine on Christian Street.
That Rocky ran here is little comfort. That it is the country's oldest and largest curbside market is no insurance. That it lives for the weekends, clings to the holidays, can be unnerving.
Which is why it is of no small consequence that Emilio "Mee Mee" Mignucci, 41, has chosen this moment to step up. He is the hard-working, third-generation co-owner of Di Bruno Bros, the cheese house (est. 1939) at 930 S. Ninth. And in August he took over as head of the market's moribund and famously fractious - often stalls versus stores - business association.
You can, if you poke around, dredge up mutterings that Di Bruno's itself, by opening a glittering Center City spin-off, is part of the problem: It is one less reason to schlep down to Ninth Street.
But the far larger consensus is that Mignucci, diamond studs in his ears and a hair-trigger hug, is making a heroic stand: "He's basically taking on a second job," said Michael Anastasio, the produce wholesaler.
Mignucci isn't starting off slow. He has a one-year term. And already he has recruited other sons of market pioneers (coffee-shop owner Anthony Anastasio, for one, whose own grandfather started a produce stand in 1938), launched committees on lighting and parking and trash, lobbied city councilmen, met with New York developers.
