Reading Terminal Market

SOME RESTAURANT reviewers are trained epicures, with a fine taste for all things digestible. Some are TV personalities who try to eat as much junk as they can in as little time as possible. Me? I'm just a kid, a kid who had a noble goal: to eat at every Reading Terminal Market food stand. For those of you who don't know Reading Terminal Market, it is paradise - a conglomeration of more restaurants, meat and produce vendors, bakeries, candy and craft shops in one block than there are cells in the body.

From the windows of her fourth-floor office at City Hall, redevelopment director Sandy Forosisky can see the front of 99 Cent Dreams, the 38,000-square-foot value store at the center of what has long been a languishing downtown. Starting in March, that view will change. The Landis Avenue dollar store is slated to be converted into a year-round public market, selling local produce, meat, seafood, specialty items, and prepared food. With it, Forosisky is hoping the city's center will change, too. The $5.62 million project, which Forosisky calls a "mini Reading Terminal," is the foundation for a $59 million city makeover.

Reading Terminal Market has fed generations of Philadelphians, wowed countless tourists and conventioneers, and set the gold standard for public markets across the country. But the market's growing profile and increasing sales, swelled by the expanded Convention Center, have created a need for more space - a good problem to have if the market weren't landlocked. "We are maxed out on space," said longtime general manager Paul Steinke. After Labor Day, several tenants are moving to larger spaces within the market as part of a $3.5 million revitalization.

EVERY DAY for the last 17 years, a desolate stretch of Hope Street has haunted Paulette Smith as she passed high above the North Philadelphia block during her commute to work on the El. It was on that gray, litter-clogged block near Montgomery Avenue where her teenage daughter's battered, lifeless body was found inside an abandoned house in October 1996, two days after a stranger had snatched her off the street only steps away from the safety of...

In an old city neighborhood where many people don't drive, a supermarket within walking distance is a necessity, say Mantua community leaders. In Mantua, that becomes one more necessity people learn to live without. Three years ago, the neighborhood's only full-service grocery, on Haverford Avenue near 34th Street, closed after a fire. Since then, Mantua residents who depend primarily on their feet for transportation either have had to buy groceries at small, expensive convenience stores or at the closest commercial shopping strip, 42nd Street and Lancaster Avenue, 10 blocks or more away, according to Charles C. Cole Jr., a community activist and board member of Mantua Community Developers.

If you thought it was raining hard outside yesterday, you should have seen it inside the Reading Terminal Market in Center City. Parts of the market, at 12th and Arch streets, were flooded with up to five inches of rainwater that had leaked through the roof and floor of the train shed overhead, cascading into the market below. The large puddles forced at least six merchants to close their businesses and kept many shoppers from venturing inside to reach the shops that remained open.

We're marching to City Council today and we're asking the people of this city to join us. We're the merchants of the Reading Terminal Market and we're marching mad. We were promised the sky and we're getting it - soaking filthy rainwater. For several months, we and our customers have endured deafening jackhammering, falling debris and paint chips, cascading water, flooding, mice, city health inspectors, grandstanding politicians and more. It's like the 10 plagues. Take us to the promised land!

Surrounded by the glitz of the Convention Center, the Reading Terminal Market is struggling to hold on to its character as a farmers' market. It battles the growing perception that it has become just another mall-like food court, said Marcy Rogovin, general manager of Reading Terminal Market Corp. To help in the fight, the venerable market soon will be decorated with 20 handcrafted outdoor signs, at a cost of $100,000, to remind passersby that the place is still what it has always been.

With luck, it may turn out that Philadelphia's new Convention Center won't damage "important Philadelphia values" or that it will "enhance and bring to life some of our finest historical monuments" as Edmund N. Bacon asserts (Op-ed Page, Nov. 8). But I'm not betting on it until I've seen some thoughtful planning and careful budgeting to help the historic Reading Terminal Market survive the four-year construction period. I'm one of the merchants there and, so far at least, I haven't heard of a sound plan to help the market make it, period, forget enhancing the neighborhood.

EVERY DAY for the last 17 years, a desolate stretch of Hope Street has haunted Paulette Smith as she passed high above the North Philadelphia block during her commute to work on the El. It was on that gray, litter-clogged block near Montgomery Avenue where her teenage daughter's battered, lifeless body was found inside an abandoned house in October 1996, two days after a stranger had snatched her off the street only steps away from the safety of...

Deep under Reading Terminal Market sits a gleaming 600-gallon steel tank connected to the outside world by 100 feet of metal pipe. Every few days, trucks pull up to the dock to fill it with milk from sheep, goats, or cows. Above it, through 18 inches of concrete and amid the bustle of the east side of the market, is a branch of Valley Shepherd Creamery, which opened this week. Unlike most market tenants, which sell products farmed or made elsewhere, Valley Shepherd creates most of its wares on-site.

For Tom George, 43, a trip to Philadelphia with his family has been a staple of the start of the Christmas season. George now lives in Oakton, Va., but gladly travels the 150-plus miles up I-95 to his childhood home. "We come up for the light show every Christmas," George said. "My dad worked at Wanamakers, so I was actually able to play with the lights in between the shows when I was a kid. " Although the light show at what is now a Macy's has been a Philadelphia institution since its debut in 1955, a more recent holiday exhibition is bringing together generations of families like the Georges.

TV food host Adam Richman toured the country and sampled 28 sandwiches, and when the smoke cleared, he named DiNic's roast pork, served at the Nicolosi family's stand at Reading Terminal Market, the best in the nation. Week by week, the Wednesday series on Travel Channel, Adam Richman's Best Sandwich in America , had been showing off the contenders. A wild card also came from Philly: John's Roast Pork's cheesesteak. (How about a John's and a DiNic's pork sandwich, head-to-head, eh?

IN A CONTEST over a humble lunch counter in Reading Terminal Market, the U.S. Olympic Committee won't win a gold medal for sprinting. Three decades after it burst from the starting block, the Greek eatery Olympic Gyro has received a cease-and-desist email from the USOC, the nonprofit corporation responsible for training and funding U.S. teams. The June 7 notice demanded deletion of the word "Olympic" from the food shop's title, claiming copyright of the word under a 1978 law. Congress granted the USOC all commercial use of Olympic imagery and terminology in the nation, including the word "Olympic" and the symbol of five interlocked rings.

They once seemed like original equipment, perpetual-motion machines, but a few of the iron men at the Reading Terminal Market have made their exits of late. You stay open 120 years, there's going to be turnover. First, Harry Ochs, the inimitable butcher, passed on. He used to hold court off center court, breaking down sides of beef. You can still see the old meat hooks. A few months ago, it was Domenic Spataro's turn. The man made it to 94, coming to work every day, presiding over the last hurrah of the chopped-egg-and-olive sandwich, living proof that, as his lunch-counter sign once promised, "Drink buttermilk and live forever.

Valley Shepherd's Eran Wajswol has blasted out the side of a North Jersey hilltop with dynamite in his quest to make the ultimate cave-aged cheese. So how hard can it be to bring a steady milk supply into the Reading Terminal Market, where he plans to begin making cheese this summer? "It's a nightmare," he says, the remnants of his Israeli-Belgian accent lilting with enough drama to make clear he's also thrilled by the challenge. "To do this in a 120-year-old building, to drill a 15-foot double pipeline through the wall into our milk tank in the basement — it's like making the Holland Tunnel.

The chicken fryers are cold and the signs are dark at Delilah's, the signature soul-food stands at Reading Terminal Market since 1984 and at 30th Street Station since 1993. The stands are closed, apparently as a result of a bankruptcy case in New Jersey, where founder Delilah Winder lives and bases her business. Winder did not return messages left at her office and on her cell phone Tuesday. Her attorneys indicate in court filings that her rents had been paid through March.

KOBE BRYANT drowned his sorrows at Delilah's (100 Spring Garden) Monday night, after his hometown loss to the Sixers. The newly single, Lower Merion-raised Lakers superstar dropped by the gentleman's club about 1 a.m. Tuesday with a few friends and was joined a little later by teammate Andrew Bynum, who had just dined at Del Frisco's (15th & Chestnut).   Rick's return? Rick Olivieri wants to bring Rick's Steaks back to the Reading Terminal Market.

Domenic C. Spataro, 94, of Buckingham, Bucks County, patriarch of Spataro's, a decades-old sandwich shop at Reading Terminal Market, died Thursday, Jan. 26, of congestive heart failure at Doylestown Hospital. "He epitomized our independent merchant community," Paul Steinke, general manager of the market, said Tuesday. "He became a legend in longevity, having worked in the market since 1930. " Steinke recalled that "occasionally someone comes to our office and says, 'My great-grandfather had some kind of store here . . . and I'm trying to figure out where it was.' "And I would march them down to Mr. Spataro, and almost to the end he would know who they were, where their stand was located, and approximately when they were here.