Patterned After Successful
Park Slope Food Co-op
By Harold Egeln
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BAY RIDGE — The community here may be on its way to enjoying what Park Slope people have long taken for granted: a food co-op.
“With all the hand-wringing over the loss of the 95th Street Key Food, we’re talking about forming a food co-op,” said Murray Gross, “broccoli-spearheading” what he and friends hope to be a grassroots movement.
“With our own homegrown food co-op, we can get better food and better prices,” he told members of Community Board 10 at its meeting last week in the Shore Hill Community Room. “We’re now looking for a location and storage place for it. We like to open a large store, something larger than Key Food.”
Gross urged people to attend a planning meeting on Wednesday, June 25 at 7:30 p.m. at Verrazano Pizzeria, 9102 Fourth Ave., and to contact him at (718) 680-5533 or baycoop@gmail.com.
The Key Food supermarket at Third Avenue and 95th Street shut down recently to make room for a Walgreens retail pharmacy superstore in a deal with the site’s property owner. A rally of 150 people outside the supermarket a few weeks ago, led by state Sen. Marty Golden, demanded that Walgreens provide supermarket services at its location. A company spokesperson said that it would not do so, but it would work with a community task force to add some additional food services.
A new Key Food Supermarket is opening in September at 242 Bay Ridge Ave. in northern Bay Ridge.
To make the Bay Ridge Food Co-Op a reality, Gross said, “We’re looking for the necessary funds. I think that this will be a benefit to the entire community. It will benefit everybody. It will benefit our seniors. Both co-op members and non-members would benefit from this.”
Patterned After
Slope, Flatbush
The co-op would be patterned along the lines of the popular Park Slope Food Co-op, Gross said. “A co-op is created by consumers themselves. What happened in Park Slope is that a group of people who met for a Sunday morning breakfast there got the idea to start one.” He also mentioned the Flatbush Food Co-op as another “successful model.”
The Park Slope Co-op, located at 782 Union St., was founded in 1973 to provide healthy affordable food. It now has more than 12,000 members. Members pay a $25 joining fee and pay a $100 investment payment; both amounts would be smaller for people at low-income levels.
“A food co-op can provide the foods we want, at the highest quality and the lowest possible price, and even discounts from local merchants that are available only to members of the co-op,” said Gross. “But it needs us to organize it.”
A Farmers’ Market
For Bay Ridge?
Bay Ridge may be ripe for more food services, if current trends foretell the direction, and respond to what Senator Golden called “a supermarket closing crisis” in Bay Ridge and the city.
A sign is the recent excitement generated by a proposed farmers market operated by the city’s Greenmarket Council on the Environment program, which started in Union Square in 1976 and has proliferated throughout the city and Brooklyn ever since.
Earlier this year, Our Lady of Angels R.C. Church’s parking lot in Bay Ridge was the sought-for location for the market. But the church rejected it because of what Father James Devlin, its pastor, said would be the need to use the parking lot for weddings, funerals and other events.
“We anticipate an announcement soon about another location,” said Councilman Vincent Gentile recently. Gentile, the prime mover for a farmers’ market in Bay Ridge, said that he and the top Greenmarket official recently scouted a location.
A disturbing trend in food resources in Bay Ridge was mentioned by Chair Dean Rasinya at the recent Community Board 10 meeting: increasing hunger among poor people. “It is a big problem here,” he said. “Many people spend two-thirds of their income on rent and have little money for food. Hunger is a problem in our community.”
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
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