Giordano’s Owner Says Goodbye as Italian Market Icon Closes

Giordano’s in the Italian Market / Photograph by R. Kennedy for GPTMC

“We tried to do everything we could to keep the store open,” Wally Giordano tells me over the phone.

It’s actually the first thing he says to me (after hello, after how-ya-doing), and he repeats it a lot. They tried everything, he and his brothers, John and Eugene. Everything they could think of. Everything they knew how to do. But none of it was enough. The world, he says, is changing. Things aren’t the way they used to be.

And now, after 105 years as a fixture in the Italian Market, his family’s multi-generational produce company, P&F Giordano Fruit and Produce, is shutting down. He thinks they’ll last another two weeks or so on the day that I talked to him. Less by the time you read this. And then it’ll be gone.

One hundred and five years is a long time. In a way, it’s hard to be sad about losing something that’s been around that long. I mean, it had its run, right? No one can call it a failure. Business changes. Neighborhoods change. Demographics change. A produce retailer and wholesaler in Philly? Who expects something like that to last forever.

But on the other hand, 105 years is a long time. And who ever expects something as fundamental to Philly as the storefront Rocky ran past when he was training for his big fight to actually close during their lifetime? It’s one of those things that, if you think about it too long, can shake your faith in the permanence of everything. Because if a place like Giordano’s — a place you can see and smell and hear like it’s right there if you just close your eyes and think about it, a place that feels as old and perpetual as cobblestones — can just go away one day, then what chance does anything else have. Entropy is a motherfucker. And it comes for us all eventually.

Wally and I talk for an hour maybe. He has lots of stories and he delights in telling them. He started working at Giordano when he was five or six years old. He’s 66 now and he’s never had another job. There were a few years in there when he was at DeSales University — still working at the shop, of course — when it looked like he might go in another direction. He tells me that one day, he was working, and two priests from the school drove down.

“They said, Get in the car, Wally. You are NOT doing this for the rest of your life. And I said, ‘Father, no. It’s not that bad.’ These were great guys. Great priests who just wanted me to do something else, but …” And he trails off, then comes back. “I mean, how could I? This was my family.”

And then he spins off, reeling out stories about his grandmother and her 15 kids — every single one of them working at the store and her there keeping them all in line. About uncles and cousins and nephews and nieces, about the men who used to work 10- to 12-hour shifts loading boxes and packing produce and how, when he was just a boy, he couldn’t ever imagine being so strong. He tells me about the day Aunt Rita fell while she was working (off a ladder, he thinks), and when she hit the ground, she just starts yelling No, I’m okay! Don’t worry about me! because she didn’t want anyone else to interrupt their work on her account.

He says to me, “I can still see them, you know? My aunts and uncles and cousins, all working there.” The memories in the place are so thick. There’s no corner they don’t live. “I look around and I can still see that.”

For a long time, Giordano’s did well. One hundred and five Christmases. One hundred and five Easter weeks with their fresh flowers. Even just in Wally’s era, he saw 60 of those. “And the store used to be packed with people,” he says. “Packed!” And they did an unbelievable amount of wholesale, too, selling produce to so many restaurants and institutions, helping to feed the whole city.

From left: A painting of the early days of Giordano’s; Frances Giordano, one of the original owners / Photographs courtesy of Wally Giordano

“And it was great. We were doing terrific. [But] it just got tougher and tougher over the years.” People weren’t coming into the shop like they used to. The traffic wasn’t what it used to be. The wholesale business kept them going for a while (at its height, wholesale made up around 70 percent of the business flowing through Giordano’s — the part of the operation that no one outside of it ever really got to see), but even that had fallen off sharply. “It was getting rougher every day toward the end,” Wally explains. “Times are changing. More people are using DoorDash and whatever else.” And I want to ask him how that’s affected the bottom line and why he thinks that change is impacting his business so badly, but I don’t get the chance because Wally is still talking. And his story? It isn’t really about that, anyway.

“The family is gone,” he says. “It’s just me and my two brothers left now. None of the kids … None of the kids wanted that.” They’re all working for the pharmaceutical companies now. They wear suits to work, not aprons. And that’s not a bad thing, of course. But still.

I ask Wally about the property being sold. He tells me there is a buyer, but his wife, Nikki, stops him before he can tell me who bought it. It’s still a secret. There’s a non-disclosure or something. And anyway, he tells me, he doesn’t know what they’re going to do with the space. He hopes it’ll be something like Giordano’s, but he doesn’t think it will be. Who can make money like that today? Selling produce and fruit to the neighbors? It’s crazy.

“But I loved it,” he says. “I loved every minute of it. Every day, I loved it.” And he tells me how, now — when all this is done — he’s going to retire. One of his brothers is going to try to keep the wholesale business going a little longer, but Wally is done. He says the hardest thing is the hours. The schedule. “I’m so used to getting up at 3 a.m., and now? What do I do?”

“I don’t know,” I say to him. “Maybe try sleeping in a little?”

“No …”

“Until 6 a.m., maybe?”

And he laughs like that’s the craziest thing he’s ever heard. He says he has no idea what’s going to happen next. What he’ll do with himself or where he’ll go.

“My son lives in La Jolla,” he says. He works in the pharmaceutical industry now, and it’s been a while since Wally has seen him. “I think I’m gonna go visit him. You know, eventually.”