Through the Plexiglas

Drive down the 4900 block of Wayne Avenue, and you're in a section of Germantown locals call "The Hollow." The name is an abbreviation of the nearby Happy Hollow Playground, but look around, and you understand the omission of the word "Happy." This isn't the city's poorest neighborhood, but signs of urban decay and looming violence are everywhere: drug dealers scanning the traffic, broken glass, abandoned houses, and, of course, the presence of the one type of business that proves you are absolutely, positively in a Philadelphia ghetto: the much vilified, always controversial "stop-'n'-go" deli.

What's a stop-'n'-go? It's a restaurant that's allowed to sell alcohol for takeout, technically. But what makes a stop-'n'-go different from, say, the Continental is where it is, who owns it, and what it looks like on the inside. Put bluntly, in Philadelphia a "stop-'n'-go" means a business located in the highest-crime areas of the city, one that has floor-to-ceiling bulletproof plastic between the customers and the merchandise, a robust trade in 40-ounce bottles of beer and malt liquor, a mostly black clientele, and owners of Asian descent.

It's also a type of business that's at the center of a nasty political fight. On one side are those who claim stop-'n'-go's are magnets for crime and disorder, "crappy little stores where dealers and prostitutes order their cheap malt liquor through grimy bulletproof windows," as former Daily News columnist Carla Anderson described them. These critics call for a level of regulation that would allow even a single complaint to result in a yanked takeout license. For a stop-'n'-go, this means you're no longer in business.

On the other side of the argument are people like Bill Chow. Bill, who just turned 34, owns a stop-'n'-go at 4931 Wayne Avenue. It's called Kenny's Seafood and Steaks, but Bill would be the first to admit his customers aren't looking for lobster bisque or prime rib. They want cheap beer and malt liquor, and they're willing to slide their money through a slot in the Plexiglas to get it. If you've ever seen a stop-'n'-go, you've probably wondered what kind of life it offers its owners. Bill Chow invited me to join him on the other side of the barrier and find out.



"PEACH, MAN! I said PEACH."

It's 7:54 p.m. on a Saturday night, and Mike Chow, Bill's 25-year-old brother, who's a graduate of Penn State, has placed a single Philly blunt in the Plexiglas opening. Mike works here 40 hours a week.

"When they talk to the wall, you can't really hear," Mike says as he hands the customer a different cigar. It's possible that very shortly this cigar will be emptied of its contents, and the slow-burning lead will be used to wrap and smoke something I have a hard time imagining goes well with peach.

"Misunderstandings or whatever," Mike says. "They'll talk into the glass and — "

"EXCUSE ME!" It's an elderly woman. "Do that on YOUR time. This is MY TIME."

Mike stares blankly.

"Can of Steel Reserve," she says.

Steel Reserve 211. Alcohol content: 8.1%. Street name: Liquid Crack.

Mike places the can in a black plastic bag.

"Paper in plastic," she says. "I want both."

This is my third visit to Kenny's. Having read the press accounts of Asian merchants getting shot when they take out the garbage, shot when they leave their buildings, shot when they're anywhere that isn't encased in bulletproof plastic, I expected a little more action than what I've seen. What I've seen is this: mind-numbing monotony. Customer walks in. Customer asks for beer and/or cigar. Customer leaves. Repeat for 16 hours a day, seven days a week, with the occasional death threat or brawl in the dining area thrown in.

Bill comes out of the back office and joins us. He and his wife Michelle have been married for two years. Their only residence, the first place they moved to after their wedding, is an apartment above the beer cooler. When Bill gave me the upstairs tour, I saw a futon mattress on the floor, a few photos, a baby crib, and a television.

Which makes sense. A stop-'n'-go may be many things, but "purveyor of high-margin goods" isn't one of them. A 40-ounce bottle of Hurricane, for example, retails for two dollars. A wholesale case is $12.50, meaning Bill makes about 95 cents a bottle. That's before taxes, mortgage, upkeep and capital improvements, such as the barbed-wire fence he had put around the back after thieves disabled his security camera, crashed through the back door, and stole his leased ATM and a few cartons of Newports. The only way to make decent money at a stop-'n'-go — about $60,000 a year total for Bill and his wife, he says — is to do what immigrant families have done with tiny stores for generations: Stay open all the time, employ your relatives, and watch every cent.

"I don't like when they treat me like a little kid," Mike says. "It's the little things. For instance, instead of 'excuse me' when I bring the wrong thing, it's 'I SAID A SIX-PACK OF BUD.'"

A man staggers in.

"Can I use the bathroom?" he asks.

"It's past the time," Mike says. The bathroom is a touchy subject with the Chows. Because Kenny's is licensed as a restaurant, the Chows are required to provide customers access to the bathroom. But doing so has resulted in stolen toilet paper, stolen soap, someone defecating on the floor, and, for a friend of theirs who owns a stop-'n'-go in North Philly, a minor flood after a customer liberated the copper piping.

The man grunts and sits at one of the tables.

A woman walks in with a little girl and smiles at Mike.

"Let me have a ginger ale," she says. She cranes her neck to see the contents of the soda cooler, but the plastic wall cuts off the angle. Watching her, and watching her little girl watch her, you can't help thinking there's something intrinsically humiliating in buying goods through a military-grade barrier. Does the little girl already understand that in her part of town, the business owners have to protect themselves against her neighbors, and that they don't do that where people have money?

"I'm sorry to make you go back," the woman says. "But can you get her an orange mango?"

Mike gets the soda. I'd like to say this woman's friendliness is the norm at Kenny's Seafood and Steaks, but for whatever reason — the polite folks don't frequent it, the very architecture of the place invites combativeness — most of the patrons I've seen are at best impatient.

A middle-aged man strides up to the glass. It's hard to hear him. "A six-pack of ... "

"Excuse me?" Bill asks.

"I TOLD YOU THE FIRST TIME. A GODDAMN SIX-PACK OF HEINEKEN."

Bill obliges. The look on his face is the vacant, Asian-guy-behind-the-bulletproof-barrier expression you see in businesses like this all over the city. It says, You can't hurt me. I might need you, but you can't hurt me. The customer has an altogether different look. It's a kind of satisfaction. It says, You might own this place, but I can still treat you like a bitch if I want to.



IN SOME WAYS, THERE'S nothing new about the tensions between Asian merchants and black customers. Replace "Asian" with "Jewish," and you're hearing the same arguments about "outsiders" exploiting the ghetto that have been going on since the 1940s. But there are important differences between Asian merchants and their predecessors. The white merchants of the 1940s did business in a city where getting shot by a teenager while taking out the garbage was unimaginable. The possibility of being gunned down by a 14-year-old for a few dollars just wasn't on the table.

That began to change in the 1960s. That's when the levels of street crime we're familiar with today — the shootings, the muggings, the drug dealing — first hit the big cities. By the 1970s, elderly white business owners, not to mention members of the black middle class, were doing what pretty much everyone with resources in the most crime-ridden parts of the inner city has been doing ever since: moving out. The economy was in free fall, the riots of the 1960s were still discouraging what little private investment could have been on its way, the large industrial employers were shutting down or heading overseas, all of which brought about the conditions you'll now find in places like the Hollow: concentrated unemployment, concentrated violence, concentrated misery. A place where nobody with good options would ever choose to open a business.

This brings us to families like the Chows. They've opened stop-'n'-go's in the ghetto thanks to their peculiar combination of talents and limitations: entrepreneurial drive, business acumen, poor English skills, access to the important players in their community, and, above all, little opportunity to do anything else.

Consider Bill Chow's father-in-law, Cuong Tran. In the early 1970s, he was a schoolteacher in rural Cambodia. As the Khmer Rouge began taking over the country in 1974, among the first victims of its genocidal campaign were intellectuals and "impure" Cambodians — those, for example, like Cuong, who was of Chinese descent. In 1975 he was imprisoned, and his family was sent to a farm labor camp. A bribe from a relative got him released in 1976, but the victory was a brief one: By 1978, Cuong and his wife and three children were incarcerated at a concentration camp, awaiting execution.

"We were deprived of everything," Yen Tran, Cuong's 37-year-old daughter, recently told me. "We had to dig out vegetables from the ground to eat. I was nine years old when I learned how to cook from scratch. I had to find the wood, start the fire, everything."

When the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia soon after their imprisonment, shutting down concentration camps, the Tran family knew their future lay somewhere far away from the wars of Southeast Asia. Their only hope came from rumors that there were Red Cross refugee camps in Thailand. That's where the family began heading, on foot, in 1980.

The Trans made it to Thailand in 1981. Several months later, thanks to the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980, they were resettled at, of all places, 45th and Chestnut in West Philadelphia.

In the early 1980s, there was already an ethnic Chinese community of "boat people" in West Philly, and Cuong started making connections with them. Through word of mouth, he heard that the farmers of South Jersey were hiring workers, and he and his family spent their summers picking blueberries and depositing money in their bank account. Three years of this, followed by another two working as a dishwasher in a Korean-owned takeout at 60th and Chestnut, and Cuong had saved just enough to have the collateral to borrow money — from established Chinese businessmen, not, obviously, from a commercial bank, for which a credit history would be a prerequisite — to open his first takeout restaurant in West Philadelphia.

By then, the early 1990s, Koreans in Philadelphia had already begun to get out of the stop-'n'-go and takeout-Chinese-food businesses. Their kids had grown up speaking English, were going to college, and planned to make money anywhere but behind bulletproof barriers. Most of the present owners of stop-'n'-go's are a step behind the Koreans. According to the Asian American Beverage Association, 70 percent of stop-'n'-go owners in Philly are ethnic Chinese from Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. And when their kids have learned English and gone on to safer work, those owners will sell to whatever new group is ready to improve its lot by way of malt liquor.

Therein lies the curious position of Bill Chow. Bill's father-in-law ran a stop-'n'-go because he had to. Bill's eight-month-old daughter, Morgan, may never see the inside of a stop-'n'-go. Bill and his wife, Michelle, are the transitional generation. Their first language is Chinese, but they're now fluent in English. Bill has an economics degree from the State University of New York. Michelle went to Penn. They're renting the building from Bill's father-in-law not only out of a sense of family obligation, but because it looked like a good opportunity — their goal is to save enough to buy their own house and open a business someplace safe.

Only that plan has been complicated by two factors. The first is competition. Across the street, a Dominican family has opened a grocery store. They may not be selling beer, but they've undercut Bill on everything else: cigars, aspirin, candy, cigarettes, chips, soda. "They came in here when they first opened," Bill says, "and looked at all our prices. Then they made everything a few cents lower."

The other reason is a brand-new state law known as Act 39. It requires all restaurants in the City of Philadelphia that sell beer for takeout to have a special license, starting in October of this year, that must be re-approved next year and every two years thereafter. In theory, this will allow a three-person panel to shutter a nuisance stop-'n'-go without much delay. Among the champions of the law is Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell.



NOT LONG AGO, I VISITED Councilwoman Blackwell at her office in City Hall. I began our conversation by asking whether she thinks all stop-'n'-go's are bad for the city.

"No," she says, "I think there are a lot of good businesses. It's always the small [ones], those that don't run well, where they sell cigarette papers, blunts, and have people with 40s standing in front of their businesses. It's always — it's always the problems that get the press. We have a lot of excellent businesses. ... But we've reached a point in our city, given the upsurge in crime, [where] people are afraid of stop-'n'-go's."

"Is there a specific place you have in mind?" I ask.

She names a West Philadelphia stop-'n'-go. "You can walk in," she says, "and there's an Asian lady holding a baby. There's, like, one loaf of bread in there. And then you walk to the back and there's still more Plexiglas with a little mouse-hole carved out. And they pass shots through the window. So that's ridiculous. And I have a responsibility and a right to vote against that if I have the chance."

Selling shots at a stop-'n'-go isn't illegal — remember, they're restaurants — but it's hard not to see that in a neighborhood where the quality of life is already fragile, a place offering dirt-cheap shots through Plexiglas isn't exactly helping things.

And this seems to be the crux of the arguments against stop-'n'-go's. Most of those arguments are very short on specific allegations of illegal activity — i.e., "I saw 10 drug deals happen at this stop-'n'-go at this time" — and long on generalizations about them being bad for the community. From what I observed while driving around the city and visiting stop-'n'-go's at night, it seems that what most people have against them is that in a city with a gun homicide crisis, a stop-'n'-go is almost by default a problem, in this sense: In the wrong neighborhood, at the wrong time of night, it's a place where the city's most at-risk population can gather, get drunk, and have the kinds of petty disputes that have resulted in hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead bodies over the past decade.

"I have one in my mother's neighborhood," Blackwell tells me, "where the owner is afraid to tell people to leave. So he's lost his business to those who want to do blunts and act unsavory. They look like they're criminals. They look like they're selling drugs. They stand in the store, so I would be afraid to go in there."

It's the oldest problem in the neighborhood handbook: loitering.

"It drags the whole community down when people who don't mean well for the community take over," Blackwell says.

The response of a stop-'n'-go owner might be that customers sitting inside his store aren't exactly something he can control, and neither is the degree to which they are or aren't savory. He'd also argue that the city and state's response has been a particularly harsh one: The law known as Act 39 allows a panel nominated by the Mayor and confirmed by City Council to review, on a regular basis, that new "takeout beer" permit all restaurants are required to have. In other words, a stop-'n'-go can be shut down even if there hasn't been a single case of illegal activity proved in court, by an unelected panel run by a city famously unfriendly to any sort of private enterprise. Sorry, Mr. Asian Immigrant. A hundred thousand spent on the building: gone. Thirty-five thousand spent on the liquor license: wasted. One of the few paths to financial success open to you: closed.

It might seem like a big leap to call this anti-Asian racial targeting, but in a city where Asians have next to no presence in politics or media, in which a Daily News columnist called for stop-'n'-go's to take down their bulletproof barriers (not banks, not the post office, not the gas company — just stop-'n'-go's), it sure feels like targeting.

At least, that's the conclusion of Bill Chow. And that's why by the time you read this, Kenny's Seafood and Steaks will be owned by somebody else. In late November, Bill sold the business. He's now working as a real estate agent in Chinatown, and living with his wife's parents in Upper Darby. He's hoping to save enough money to open another retail shop — in Delaware.



KENNY'S CHANGES AROUND midnight. The job, as performed by Mike, Bill and, at times of extreme boredom, me, acquires an air of danger as the customers become younger and tougher.

"Mixed Fruit Special Brew," a customer says. I walk to the cooler and try to find it among the Hurricane, Country Club, Hennessy, Olde English and Coqui 900.

"Look where you're standing," Mike says after the customer leaves. I'm directly in front of the rectangular hole in the barrier. "If you duck down, they can still physically stick their hand in and shoot you. But if you're on this side" — he's about two feet away from the opening in the barrier — "they can't get you. Maybe that's why I can't hear so well."

Two guys, hoods up and scowls on their faces, stroll in.

"It's a white dude!" the shorter one yells. His name is Razul. His friend is Marl.

"You the new owner?" asks Marl.

"No, I'm a reporter."

They tell me they want to be interviewed. I activate my tape recorder and ask whether it would make customers feel better if there were no bulletproof barrier.

"Y'all take this glass down ... " says Marl.

" ... Niggas gonna jump over that counter," says Razul.

"There will be a gun in your face," says Marl.

They bang on the barrier.

"This is good," says Razul.

"This is good," agrees Marl. "This keep the 'hood level. We don't want to come through. But if y'all tempt a motherfucker to come through, motherfuckers gonna come through."

So much for the theory of improved community relations via barrier-free stop-'n'-go's. The conversation turns to how one can avoid getting shot in a time when getting shot happens rather frequently in Philadelphia.

"Round these days and these times, you just got to be careful," says Marl.

"What's the sort of mistake you can make that will get you in trouble?" I ask.

"A mistake? I'll tell you how you can make a mistake these days. Minding somebody's else business."

I take that as a sign the interview has ended. They say goodbye and take their beer.

As we get closer to closing, the customers keep coming in. Some of them look like any other working people buying beer on a Saturday night. Some of them could probably use anything in their lives besides another 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor. You'll likely see much the same range of customers at any bar or restaurant, but here, in so deprived a neighborhood, the clientele seems to encapsulate the entire debate about stop-'n'-go's. Would the Hollow be better off without any places to buy alcohol? Maybe. Should families like the Chows and the Trans have their path to the middle class choked off by a zoning regulation? It depends, perhaps literally, on your perspective.

Just before 1 a.m., I decide to leave. It's been a long and tedious shift. I shake hands with Bill and walk outside. Inside, Bill Chow sits alone, waiting for another customer.

A Philadelphia native, Gregory Gilderman wrote Philadelphia magazine's November cover story, "The Dead of Night."

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