Philadelphia livestock shop a touch of home for immigrants

Along the shopping strip of Woodland Avenue, between the pizza shop and an abandoned building, a wind chime carved with the Chinese symbol for luck dangles in the doorway, next to a well-used fly strip. In walks a young woman chatting in Spanish on her cellphone. A regular, she passes through a second glass door to the middle of the store, stands in front of a wall of cages that house live chickens, and picks out a plump red pullet.

A clerk holds the prized poultry by its feet and places it on the scale. After an agreement of sale is reached, he takes the bird in the back to dress it, which at Woodland Avenue Livestock in Southwest Philadelphia means to slaughter it and prepare it for the stove, while the woman waits outside. The task takes about 10 minutes, and costs $13.50 at $2.40 per pound.

Open for about two years, the slaughterhouse, one of a few in the city, has become part of the neighborhood's texture, giving many who have immigrated to the community a place to buy poultry in a way that conjures up something of home.

It sits on the 6600 block of Woodland Avenue, standing out among an insurance company, a nail salon, and a Jamaican restaurant. Bach Long Nguyen, the owner, originally from Vietnam, lives a few blocks away with his wife and their youngest son. Nguyen purposefully employs two people from the community: Mamadee Kamara from Liberia, a Muslim who, as a service to observant customers, dresses chickens in the name of Allah, and Marco Hennandes from Guatemala, who deals with customers most comfortable conversing in Spanish.

In pockets surrounding the store are neighbors from China, India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Jamaica. The cultural mix comes together in the sounds, wares, and cuisine along the 10-block retail stretch of Woodland Avenue starting at 58th Street.

"The culture is always there," says Nguyen, 47, a short, pleasant man, with a tuft of black hair like a rooster's comb, who in Vietnam made a humble living working in a candy factory. His wife, Banh, was a seamstress. "There's a lot of foreigners who come here and want that taste," he said of the penchant for the fresh poultry he serves. Fresher is sweeter.