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906 Curtis Street, now Los Molinos Restaurant, was once a neighborhood grocery that stood alongside other thriving small businesses, such as a bakery and barbershop. Some of these shops were owned by Westsiders and provided residents with accessible goods, an early credit system, and jobs.
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Transcript
Rachel Gross: Take a peek into the windows of Los Molinos on the corner of 9th street. Instead of a restaurant, imagine the Groussman Grocery store, built in 1906 by Albert and Bella Groussman. It was a general store that once provided milk, eggs, meat, and penny candy to the community. Imagine the neighborhood kids walking home from school and rushing inside the store with their tennis shoes slapping on the wooden floor, taking the pennies they made from washing windshields, and reaching into the candy jar on the counter.
Rita Gomez, who lived across the street, recalls running errands to the store for her grandmother, who had a secret deal with the store worker, Eddie:
Rita Gomez: My grandmother was diabetic, and she would write a little note and she’d tell me, Give this only to Eddie. And I’d say, okay, go up there, give him the thing. And then he’d put two bags, one bag here, and then he’d tell me, Make sure your grandma gets this right away. And I thought, Oh, it must be medicine or something. You know, I’d run all the way up there. Turns out she was ordering ice cream.
Rachel Gross: Customers could put their ice cream or eggs on a tab. Workers would stop in on their way home, pick up a pound of meat, and pay for it when they received their monthly checks. Gloria Gallegos, who lived around the corner at 8th and Curtis Streets, remembers Eddie regularly offering credit for folks in the community:
Gloria Gallegos: He used to do tabs for my…like my mom would say…and back then we were allowed to do this…’Can you go get me a pack of cigarettes at the store and put it on my tab? Just tell him to put it on my tab.’ So that was, I guess, the beginning of what would have been credit.
Rachel Gross: This early credit system was important to sustaining the neighborhood. Residents knew they could get what they needed just by walking a block or two.
If you look up and down the street outside Los Molinos, try to imagine the many small businesses that made this a vibrant community. There was a bakery, a barbershop, and another small grocery owned by Cecilia Lopez-Albertson’s grandmother. Cecilia remembers her brother’s first haircut at Ernie’s barbershop just across from her grandmother’s store.
Cecilia Lopez-Albertson: I remember Ernie Lopez, Ernie the Barber, and his last name was Lopez, too, but not of any relation. But he had his barber shop right across the street from grandma and everybody got their first haircut there. All the boys did. My brother was..there are pictures of my brother crying in the chair, getting his haircut. But everybody has that memory of crying from their first haircut.
Rachel Gross: Whether it was a secret pint of ice cream or a pound of beef for a tamale dinner, the small businesses contributed to a sense of connectedness.
To continue the tour, walk north across the traffic roundabout and continue up 9th Street Plaza past the covered bus stop. Follow alongside a long red brick building on your right-hand side. Stop at the first set of stairs leading to a doorway into the building, at 1150 10th Street.