A man killed: Drugs, murder, and indie rock at the Broadway Food Market
Anyone who spends much time driving on South Broadway has probably noticed the festive-looking red, white, and green building at Broadway and Coal. It's an old corner grocery store, standing at the foot of the Coal viaduct like a relic from another time. In 1982, when it was still the Broadway Food Market, the Albuquerque Journal described the experience of stepping inside in the same way: "like going back in time".1 But this is not just the story of a quaint old building. It’s a story of hard work, tragedy, and one family's American dream, along with a couple of pretty surprising pop culture connections.
To trace the origins of the building, we need to go all the way back to around 1900, when a young immigrant named Ferdinando "Fred" Tagliaferro (1884-1928)2 arrived in Albuquerque from the city of Campobasso in southern Italy.1 He started a career as a shoemaker, and by 1910 was listed in the census as owning his own shop.3 In 1917 he took over an existing shoe store on Second Street that had been damaged in a fire,4 eventually renaming it City Electric Shoe Repair.
Evidently the shoe business was pretty good, because by about 19145 he was already able to purchase a house and small commercial building at the east end of the Coal viaduct. This piece of property had an interesting history, as it had previously been the headquarters of a quack medicine outfit called the Romero Drug Company which moved to Albuquerque from Las Vegas, N.M., in 1905.6 The company's main product was an all-purpose remedy called "La Sanadora", which was supposed to treat everything from headaches and rheumatism to "stings of insects and reptiles", "rump ache", and "twitching of the eyebrows". Unfortunately the product didn't actually do any of what was claimed, though I'm sure it did have some interesting effects since it contained 89% alcohol along with opium and chloroform. The U.S. Department of Agriculture got wind of the operation in 1910 and fined Romero for making misleading claims.7
After Romero's fall from grace, the company's former office housed a couple of short-lived businesses including a used car dealership and an ice cream shop, but it was vacant by the time Tagliaferro acquired the property. He had big plans though, and a couple of years later he got to work expanding the one-story adobe building into a large, modern grocery store. Rather than knocking down the existing building, he simply built over and around it, hiding it inside a new two-story brick exterior.8 Tagliaferro's building had two large commercial spaces on the ground floor, for the grocery and meat market, and nine apartments upstairs.9 Construction probably started in 1917, since this is the date on the parapet over the main entrance, but it doesn't seem to have been finished until 1919. This is borne out by the 1919 Sanborn map, which has the outline of the building marked "from plans", probably indicating it was under construction at the time the map was compiled.10
On December 23, 1919, the Standard Cash Grocery opened for business at last.11 Tagliaferro wasn't interested in running the store himself; he wasn't familiar with the grocery business and had his shoe shop to attend to. Instead he leased it to a succession of different proprietors, none of whom apparently had much success there. Since running a grocery store had low barriers to entry, required only modest physical labor, and carried a certain degree of respectability, it was an extremely popular career choice at the time, which meant that it was also ruthlessly competitive.12 In Albuquerque, the 1920 city directory listed 96 different grocers serving a population of just over 15,000, or one for every 158 people.13 The result was that most new stores didn't last long.
With such a saturated market and high turnover, it was hard for grocers to stand out, and the slightest misstep (like closing half an hour earlier than a competitor, or having to hire a delivery driver instead of having a teenage son do the job for free) could lead to failure.12 The Hardnot brothers, who were running the store in 1920, tried out the Bart Simpson method of advertising to boost their profile with an attention-grabbing headline: "A Man Killed".14 They didn't realize it at the time but this would turn out to be strangely prophetic.
Even with the extreme measures, the store was failing. The last proprietor called it quits in 1922, taking a parting shot with an advertisement complaining about the "high rent".15 Rather than looking for someone else to run the store, Tagliaferro decided to make a go of it himself. On November 3 he listed his entire shop and shoe repairing equipment for sale—"Going into other line of business reason for selling"—and twelve days later he was a grocer.16,17 It doesn't seem like he fared much better than the others, though, which probably wasn't helped by him apparently being a bit of a hothead. In one instance, he was accused of punching a customer in the face over an unpaid bill.18 He also got into a dispute with the city over improperly placed sidewalks around his property, during which he showed up in person to rant at the City Commission. The Journal reported drily that "The appellant made out a case which was difficult to grasp… Harking back again to the misplaced curbing Tagliaferro went away stating that he knew of others whose sidewalks were out of place and he would demand a general reshuffling of these."19 He ended up lasting only a year, selling the business to Thomas W. Plunkett in late 1923 and returning to the shoe repair shop like nothing had happened.20
The grocery experiment wasn't a success, but Tagliaferro was still able to keep increasing his real estate holdings. In 1923, he started construction on the Broadway Apartments, a 20-unit complex across the street from the grocery,21 and around 1924 he added a small adobe building at 419 Broadway to house his relocated shoe shop, which he named the Broadway Shoe Hospital.22 He also expanded the grocery building around 1927 by building out the rear porch into an addition.23 The fact that he was able to do all of this on a shoemaker's income, while also having seven children, shows just how different the economy was in the 1920s compared to now.
Things seemed to be going well for Tagliaferro, but there was trouble brewing. Specifically, the problem was his elderly father Rafael (c. 1852-1932),2 whose behavior was becoming increasingly erratic. He had gotten in trouble at least twice for firearm-related incidents, including shooting at neighbors from his porch in 1925. A police officer involved in that case "testified that he regarded it as dangerous for Tagliaferro to have guns, as he uses them recklessly."24 Nevertheless, he was caught shooting guns on his property again in 1927.25 This time a judge committed him to the insane asylum, but he was paroled.26 Another incident, in which two women were bitten by Rafael's dog, escalated to the old man throwing himself on the floor at the police station and threatening suicide.27 He seemed to be a ticking time bomb but was mostly left to his own devices.
Around 9 am on February 10, 1928, Rafael showed up at the Broadway Shoe Hospital and got into an altercation with Fred, whom he claimed not to have seen in two years even though they lived only six blocks apart. Passersby reported hearing gunshots and saw Rafael, who was described as "white-haired and feeble" (he was about 76 at the time), leaving the shop shortly after. Inside, the shoemaker was found dead. Rafael was apprehended en route to his house and was found to be in possession of the murder weapon, though he denied having killed or even spoken to his son.28 He was found insane29 and spent the rest of his life at the state asylum.
Tagliaferro's death at only 44 left his wife Florenzina "Florence" Tagliaferro (1889-1972)2 to care for seven children and manage the family's rental properties all by herself. Fortunately, she turned out to be more than capable. She didn't just maintain the existing rentals, but also continued to add new ones, including an office building she had built on San Mateo in the 1950s.30 She continued to live in the family home behind the store until her death in 1972, flaunting her status around town in a huge Cadillac that required its own extra-wide parking bay.9
Meanwhile, Plunkett, the grocery store owner, had apparently gotten a firsthand look at Tagliaferro's operations and concluded that the real money was in apartments, not groceries. So in 1928 he built his own apartment complex, just a block away at Coal and Edith,31 and the following year he sold the grocery store to a new owner named Robert A. Jones (1880-1958).32 Jones wasn't that notable himself, but his 20-year-old daughter Vivian Vance was an aspiring actor who would eventually find fame as as a main cast member on I Love Lucy and become the first winner of the Emmy for Best Supporting Actress. After arriving in Albuquerque, she made a name for herself in the local theater scene, especially at the Albuquerque Little Theatre, where she starred in many of the earliest productions. Recognizing her talent, the theater held a benefit show in 1932 to send her to New York.33,34 She then spent a decade working her way up through Broadway before moving to Los Angeles and getting her big break on TV. However, her father did not find the same level of success with the grocery store, nor did his successors, first the Pierce brothers and then Agostino Gangale.1
The person who finally did turn the store into a successful business was Tony Tagliaferro (1921-2012),35 Fred and Florence's only son. In 1946 he was freshly back from Alaska, where he had been stationed during the war as an airplane mechanic,36 and needed a job. He and his brother-in-law Thomas Chiado took over the grocery store from Gangale and renamed it the Broadway Food Market. Chiado quit after a few years to work at Sandia Labs, but Tagliaferro kept on going. The grocery store landscape was starting to change by this point; small mom-and-pop stores were on the way out, and chains like Barber's, Rhodes, and Safeway were starting to take over. But as fancy new supermarkets were going up in wealthier areas of the city, Tagliaferro's store was still able to fill a niche in the South Broadway community long after neighborhood corner groceries were even a thing.1
In 1982, the Journal published a story about the market, which Tagliaferro had then been running for 36 years with almost no changes. Even the old mechanical cash register and a decorative oversized Corn Flakes box were still in place from the 1940s, though Tony did have to brick over one of the original shop windows when a car drove through it in the 1970s. The house behind the store, where Tony was born, was still home to his two oldest sisters, Estelle and Louise. But by the time of the article, business was finally starting to dry up. Customers, mainly neighborhood old-timers, were getting fewer, and Tony was having to pick up most of his merchandise himself since grocery wholesalers wouldn't deliver to such a small store.1 Two years later when a property developer made an offer for the store, he accepted gladly.
Fortunately the new owner, Kreg Hill, liked the building's un-gentrified appearance and wanted to reuse the space without changing it too much. He worked with architect Alan Nagle to convert the vacant ground floor into four loft-style studio/apartment spaces catering to local artists, while the existing apartments on the second floor were mostly kept as they were. Tony Tagliaferro was reportedly "enthused" about the project and was able to retire with pride from a job well done.9
As of this writing, the Broadway Market building hasn't really changed since the 1980s, so this might seem like the end of the story. But there's one last twist, and this is something I think barely anyone knows about. Around 2000-2001, one of the residents of the building was a young musician named James Mercer.37 He had a band called the Shins and they recorded their first album in his apartment.38 This probably wouldn't be too surprising on its own, since the building was remodeled with exactly this kind of use in mind. But (as indie rock fans will already know) the Shins blew up, and that album, Oh Inverted World, sold over half a million copies.39 Not bad for a recording made in an old grocery store in New Mexico.
So that's the story so far. The building is over 100 years old now (in fact, the old adobe part is more like 115) and still remarkably well preserved. Its first century has seen everything from murder and sketchy medicines to rising stars and a gold record, but mainly a lot of very hard work keeping a small neighborhood store open for 65 years. Is another masterpiece being made there as we speak? Only time will tell, but I hope Fred Tagliaferro's cheerful red brick building continues to liven up the intersection for a long time to come.
Sources
1. Ripp, Bart. "Store Offers Nostalgia Along With Food." Albuquerque Journal, July 4, 1982. Via Newspapers.com.
2. "Mount Calvary Cemetery." Interment.net
3. 1910 U.S. Census via MyHeritage.com.
4. "Batch's Shoe Shop Is Destroyed by Fire." Albuquerque Journal, March 28, 1917. Via Newspapers.com.
5. Worley's Directory: Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1915 via Ancestry Library.
6. History of New Mexico: Its Resources and People. Los Angeles: Pacific States Publishing Co., 1907, p. 457. Via Google Books.
7. "Notice of Judgment No. 1076: Misbranding of a Drug Product — 'La Sanadora.'" U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1911. Via Google Books.
8. Albuquerque Mar. 1924, Sheet 20. Sanborn Map Co. via ProQuest Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970.
9. Tessier, Denise. "70-Year-Old City Grocery To Become Artists' Haven." Albuquerque Journal, August 14, 1984. Via Newspapers.com.
10. Albuquerque Aug. 1919, Sheet 20. Sanborn Map Co. via ProQuest Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970.
11. "Announcement" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, December 22, 1919. Via Newspapers.com.
12. Levinson, Marc. The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011, pp. 75-85. Via Google Books.
13. Hudspeth Directory Company's Albuquerque City Directory 1920 via Ancestry Library.
14. "A Man Killed" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, October 16, 1920. Via Newspapers.com.
15. "Closing Out Sale" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, October 8, 1922. Via Newspapers.com.
16. "For sale—Shoe repairing shop" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, November 3, 1922. Via Newspapers.com.
17. "The Standard Grocery" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, November 15, 1922. Via Newspapers.com.
18. "Grocer Charged with Hitting Customer in Face with His Fist." Albuquerque Journal, February 20, 1923. Via Newspapers.com.
19. "A Misplaced Curbing." Albuquerque Journal, August 16, 1923. Via Newspapers.com.
20. "Every Monday" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, December 4, 1924. Via Newspapers.com.
21. "August Permits Run $50,000 in 11-Day Period." Albuquerque Journal, August 12, 1923. Via Newspapers.com.
22. "Shoemaker" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, October 22, 1924. Via Newspapers.com.
23. "Permit to Remodel Store Front Given Clothing Concern." Albuquerque Journal, March 19, 1927. Via Newspapers.com.
24. "Man Is Fined for Shooting at Neighbors." Albuquerque Journal, August 26, 1925. Via Newspapers.com.
25. "Neighbors Accuse Man of Disturbing Peace with Gun." Albuquerque Journal, April 4, 1927. Via Newspapers.com.
26. "Around Albuquerque." Albuquerque Journal, April 6, 1927. Via Newspapers.com.
27. "Aged Man Falls to Floor When Grief Hits Him." Albuquerque Journal, November 4, 1925. Via Newspapers.com.
28. "Aged Father's Denial Given to Charge of Murdering Son." Albuquerque Journal, February 11, 1928. Via Newspapers.com.
29. "Tagliaferro's Widow Granted $8,000 Damages." Albuquerque Journal, August 24, 1928. Via Newspapers.com.
30. "Builders Propose 113 New Homes." Albuquerque Journal, October 19, 1954. Via Newspapers.com.
31. "Albuquerque's Newest and Most Modern Apartment" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, August 26, 1928. Via Newspapers.com.
32. "Funeral Rites for TV Actress' Father Saturday." Albuquerque Journal, December 5, 1958. Via Newspapers.com.
33. "Vivian Vance to Play Emotional Role in Final Performance Here Tuesday at Crystal Theater." Albuquerque Journal, August 14, 1932. Via Newspapers.com.
34. [Among the countless girls...] New York Daily News, September 15, 1932. Via Newspapers.com.
35. "Tagliaferro, Tony Ralph." Albuquerque Journal, October 28, 2012. Via Newspapers.com.
36. "Enlisted Record and Report of Separation: Tagliaferro Tony R" via Ancestry Library.
37. U.S. Phone and Address Directories, 1993-2002 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005. City: Albuquerque; State: New Mexico; Year(s): 2000-2001. Via Ancestry Library.
38. Shins, the. [Any car buffs...] Facebook, 2015.
39. Gold & Platinum: The Shins. RIAA.
 |
| Author’s photo, 2006. |
To trace the origins of the building, we need to go all the way back to around 1900, when a young immigrant named Ferdinando "Fred" Tagliaferro (1884-1928)2 arrived in Albuquerque from the city of Campobasso in southern Italy.1 He started a career as a shoemaker, and by 1910 was listed in the census as owning his own shop.3 In 1917 he took over an existing shoe store on Second Street that had been damaged in a fire,4 eventually renaming it City Electric Shoe Repair.
 |
| Advertisement for Tagliaferro’s shoe shop, 1917. Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com. |
Evidently the shoe business was pretty good, because by about 19145 he was already able to purchase a house and small commercial building at the east end of the Coal viaduct. This piece of property had an interesting history, as it had previously been the headquarters of a quack medicine outfit called the Romero Drug Company which moved to Albuquerque from Las Vegas, N.M., in 1905.6 The company's main product was an all-purpose remedy called "La Sanadora", which was supposed to treat everything from headaches and rheumatism to "stings of insects and reptiles", "rump ache", and "twitching of the eyebrows". Unfortunately the product didn't actually do any of what was claimed, though I'm sure it did have some interesting effects since it contained 89% alcohol along with opium and chloroform. The U.S. Department of Agriculture got wind of the operation in 1910 and fined Romero for making misleading claims.7
 |
| Advertisement for "La Sanadora" manufactured by Romero Drug Co., 1906. Albuquerque Citizen via Newspapers.com. |
After Romero's fall from grace, the company's former office housed a couple of short-lived businesses including a used car dealership and an ice cream shop, but it was vacant by the time Tagliaferro acquired the property. He had big plans though, and a couple of years later he got to work expanding the one-story adobe building into a large, modern grocery store. Rather than knocking down the existing building, he simply built over and around it, hiding it inside a new two-story brick exterior.8 Tagliaferro's building had two large commercial spaces on the ground floor, for the grocery and meat market, and nine apartments upstairs.9 Construction probably started in 1917, since this is the date on the parapet over the main entrance, but it doesn't seem to have been finished until 1919. This is borne out by the 1919 Sanborn map, which has the outline of the building marked "from plans", probably indicating it was under construction at the time the map was compiled.10
 |
| The grand opening of the Standard Cash Grocery in 1919. Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com. |
 |
| The oldest photo of the building I could find, from around 1925. This was after construction of the Broadway Shoe Hospital (on the right) but before the rear addition. Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com. |
On December 23, 1919, the Standard Cash Grocery opened for business at last.11 Tagliaferro wasn't interested in running the store himself; he wasn't familiar with the grocery business and had his shoe shop to attend to. Instead he leased it to a succession of different proprietors, none of whom apparently had much success there. Since running a grocery store had low barriers to entry, required only modest physical labor, and carried a certain degree of respectability, it was an extremely popular career choice at the time, which meant that it was also ruthlessly competitive.12 In Albuquerque, the 1920 city directory listed 96 different grocers serving a population of just over 15,000, or one for every 158 people.13 The result was that most new stores didn't last long.
With such a saturated market and high turnover, it was hard for grocers to stand out, and the slightest misstep (like closing half an hour earlier than a competitor, or having to hire a delivery driver instead of having a teenage son do the job for free) could lead to failure.12 The Hardnot brothers, who were running the store in 1920, tried out the Bart Simpson method of advertising to boost their profile with an attention-grabbing headline: "A Man Killed".14 They didn't realize it at the time but this would turn out to be strangely prophetic.
 |
| Who did it better? Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com (left) and 20th Century Fox (right). |
Even with the extreme measures, the store was failing. The last proprietor called it quits in 1922, taking a parting shot with an advertisement complaining about the "high rent".15 Rather than looking for someone else to run the store, Tagliaferro decided to make a go of it himself. On November 3 he listed his entire shop and shoe repairing equipment for sale—"Going into other line of business reason for selling"—and twelve days later he was a grocer.16,17 It doesn't seem like he fared much better than the others, though, which probably wasn't helped by him apparently being a bit of a hothead. In one instance, he was accused of punching a customer in the face over an unpaid bill.18 He also got into a dispute with the city over improperly placed sidewalks around his property, during which he showed up in person to rant at the City Commission. The Journal reported drily that "The appellant made out a case which was difficult to grasp… Harking back again to the misplaced curbing Tagliaferro went away stating that he knew of others whose sidewalks were out of place and he would demand a general reshuffling of these."19 He ended up lasting only a year, selling the business to Thomas W. Plunkett in late 1923 and returning to the shoe repair shop like nothing had happened.20
The grocery experiment wasn't a success, but Tagliaferro was still able to keep increasing his real estate holdings. In 1923, he started construction on the Broadway Apartments, a 20-unit complex across the street from the grocery,21 and around 1924 he added a small adobe building at 419 Broadway to house his relocated shoe shop, which he named the Broadway Shoe Hospital.22 He also expanded the grocery building around 1927 by building out the rear porch into an addition.23 The fact that he was able to do all of this on a shoemaker's income, while also having seven children, shows just how different the economy was in the 1920s compared to now.
 |
| The evolution of the property on the Sanborn maps from 1908 (left), 1919 (center), and 1931 (right). Via Digital Sanborn Maps (1908), (1919), (1931), full sheet available. |
Things seemed to be going well for Tagliaferro, but there was trouble brewing. Specifically, the problem was his elderly father Rafael (c. 1852-1932),2 whose behavior was becoming increasingly erratic. He had gotten in trouble at least twice for firearm-related incidents, including shooting at neighbors from his porch in 1925. A police officer involved in that case "testified that he regarded it as dangerous for Tagliaferro to have guns, as he uses them recklessly."24 Nevertheless, he was caught shooting guns on his property again in 1927.25 This time a judge committed him to the insane asylum, but he was paroled.26 Another incident, in which two women were bitten by Rafael's dog, escalated to the old man throwing himself on the floor at the police station and threatening suicide.27 He seemed to be a ticking time bomb but was mostly left to his own devices.
Around 9 am on February 10, 1928, Rafael showed up at the Broadway Shoe Hospital and got into an altercation with Fred, whom he claimed not to have seen in two years even though they lived only six blocks apart. Passersby reported hearing gunshots and saw Rafael, who was described as "white-haired and feeble" (he was about 76 at the time), leaving the shop shortly after. Inside, the shoemaker was found dead. Rafael was apprehended en route to his house and was found to be in possession of the murder weapon, though he denied having killed or even spoken to his son.28 He was found insane29 and spent the rest of his life at the state asylum.
 |
| Rafael Tagliaferro listed as an inmate at the New Mexico Insane Asylum in the 1930 Census. Via MyHeritage Library Edition. |
Tagliaferro's death at only 44 left his wife Florenzina "Florence" Tagliaferro (1889-1972)2 to care for seven children and manage the family's rental properties all by herself. Fortunately, she turned out to be more than capable. She didn't just maintain the existing rentals, but also continued to add new ones, including an office building she had built on San Mateo in the 1950s.30 She continued to live in the family home behind the store until her death in 1972, flaunting her status around town in a huge Cadillac that required its own extra-wide parking bay.9
 |
| Mrs. Tagliaferro, undated photo. Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com. |
Meanwhile, Plunkett, the grocery store owner, had apparently gotten a firsthand look at Tagliaferro's operations and concluded that the real money was in apartments, not groceries. So in 1928 he built his own apartment complex, just a block away at Coal and Edith,31 and the following year he sold the grocery store to a new owner named Robert A. Jones (1880-1958).32 Jones wasn't that notable himself, but his 20-year-old daughter Vivian Vance was an aspiring actor who would eventually find fame as as a main cast member on I Love Lucy and become the first winner of the Emmy for Best Supporting Actress. After arriving in Albuquerque, she made a name for herself in the local theater scene, especially at the Albuquerque Little Theatre, where she starred in many of the earliest productions. Recognizing her talent, the theater held a benefit show in 1932 to send her to New York.33,34 She then spent a decade working her way up through Broadway before moving to Los Angeles and getting her big break on TV. However, her father did not find the same level of success with the grocery store, nor did his successors, first the Pierce brothers and then Agostino Gangale.1
 |
| A 1930 advertisement for R. A. Jones’ grocery store. Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com. |
 |
| Inside the store, c. 1930, with Jones at right. Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com. |
 |
| Vivian Vance in 1929, the same year her father Robert A. Jones took over the Broadway market, and around 1960 with the cast of I Love Lucy (Vance at lower left). Via Santa Fe New Mexican (left); Wikimedia Commons (right). |
The person who finally did turn the store into a successful business was Tony Tagliaferro (1921-2012),35 Fred and Florence's only son. In 1946 he was freshly back from Alaska, where he had been stationed during the war as an airplane mechanic,36 and needed a job. He and his brother-in-law Thomas Chiado took over the grocery store from Gangale and renamed it the Broadway Food Market. Chiado quit after a few years to work at Sandia Labs, but Tagliaferro kept on going. The grocery store landscape was starting to change by this point; small mom-and-pop stores were on the way out, and chains like Barber's, Rhodes, and Safeway were starting to take over. But as fancy new supermarkets were going up in wealthier areas of the city, Tagliaferro's store was still able to fill a niche in the South Broadway community long after neighborhood corner groceries were even a thing.1
 |
| Tony Tagliaferro with his first wife Ireen in 1952. Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com. |
 |
| Ad for the Broadway Food Market, 1947. Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com. |
In 1982, the Journal published a story about the market, which Tagliaferro had then been running for 36 years with almost no changes. Even the old mechanical cash register and a decorative oversized Corn Flakes box were still in place from the 1940s, though Tony did have to brick over one of the original shop windows when a car drove through it in the 1970s. The house behind the store, where Tony was born, was still home to his two oldest sisters, Estelle and Louise. But by the time of the article, business was finally starting to dry up. Customers, mainly neighborhood old-timers, were getting fewer, and Tony was having to pick up most of his merchandise himself since grocery wholesalers wouldn't deliver to such a small store.1 Two years later when a property developer made an offer for the store, he accepted gladly.
 |
| Tony Tagliaferro with his second wife Billie and sister Irene inside the store in 1982. Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com. |
Fortunately the new owner, Kreg Hill, liked the building's un-gentrified appearance and wanted to reuse the space without changing it too much. He worked with architect Alan Nagle to convert the vacant ground floor into four loft-style studio/apartment spaces catering to local artists, while the existing apartments on the second floor were mostly kept as they were. Tony Tagliaferro was reportedly "enthused" about the project and was able to retire with pride from a job well done.9
 |
| The building just before being converted to apartments in 1984. Albuquerque Journal via Newspapers.com. |
 |
| A photo from the property listing showing the remodeled grocery store space, now an apartment. Via Deacon Property Services. |
As of this writing, the Broadway Market building hasn't really changed since the 1980s, so this might seem like the end of the story. But there's one last twist, and this is something I think barely anyone knows about. Around 2000-2001, one of the residents of the building was a young musician named James Mercer.37 He had a band called the Shins and they recorded their first album in his apartment.38 This probably wouldn't be too surprising on its own, since the building was remodeled with exactly this kind of use in mind. But (as indie rock fans will already know) the Shins blew up, and that album, Oh Inverted World, sold over half a million copies.39 Not bad for a recording made in an old grocery store in New Mexico.
 |
| A post about the building from James Mercer, 2015. Via Facebook. |
So that's the story so far. The building is over 100 years old now (in fact, the old adobe part is more like 115) and still remarkably well preserved. Its first century has seen everything from murder and sketchy medicines to rising stars and a gold record, but mainly a lot of very hard work keeping a small neighborhood store open for 65 years. Is another masterpiece being made there as we speak? Only time will tell, but I hope Fred Tagliaferro's cheerful red brick building continues to liven up the intersection for a long time to come.
Sources
1. Ripp, Bart. "Store Offers Nostalgia Along With Food." Albuquerque Journal, July 4, 1982. Via Newspapers.com.
2. "Mount Calvary Cemetery." Interment.net
3. 1910 U.S. Census via MyHeritage.com.
4. "Batch's Shoe Shop Is Destroyed by Fire." Albuquerque Journal, March 28, 1917. Via Newspapers.com.
5. Worley's Directory: Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1915 via Ancestry Library.
6. History of New Mexico: Its Resources and People. Los Angeles: Pacific States Publishing Co., 1907, p. 457. Via Google Books.
7. "Notice of Judgment No. 1076: Misbranding of a Drug Product — 'La Sanadora.'" U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1911. Via Google Books.
8. Albuquerque Mar. 1924, Sheet 20. Sanborn Map Co. via ProQuest Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970.
9. Tessier, Denise. "70-Year-Old City Grocery To Become Artists' Haven." Albuquerque Journal, August 14, 1984. Via Newspapers.com.
10. Albuquerque Aug. 1919, Sheet 20. Sanborn Map Co. via ProQuest Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970.
11. "Announcement" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, December 22, 1919. Via Newspapers.com.
12. Levinson, Marc. The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011, pp. 75-85. Via Google Books.
13. Hudspeth Directory Company's Albuquerque City Directory 1920 via Ancestry Library.
14. "A Man Killed" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, October 16, 1920. Via Newspapers.com.
15. "Closing Out Sale" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, October 8, 1922. Via Newspapers.com.
16. "For sale—Shoe repairing shop" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, November 3, 1922. Via Newspapers.com.
17. "The Standard Grocery" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, November 15, 1922. Via Newspapers.com.
18. "Grocer Charged with Hitting Customer in Face with His Fist." Albuquerque Journal, February 20, 1923. Via Newspapers.com.
19. "A Misplaced Curbing." Albuquerque Journal, August 16, 1923. Via Newspapers.com.
20. "Every Monday" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, December 4, 1924. Via Newspapers.com.
21. "August Permits Run $50,000 in 11-Day Period." Albuquerque Journal, August 12, 1923. Via Newspapers.com.
22. "Shoemaker" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, October 22, 1924. Via Newspapers.com.
23. "Permit to Remodel Store Front Given Clothing Concern." Albuquerque Journal, March 19, 1927. Via Newspapers.com.
24. "Man Is Fined for Shooting at Neighbors." Albuquerque Journal, August 26, 1925. Via Newspapers.com.
25. "Neighbors Accuse Man of Disturbing Peace with Gun." Albuquerque Journal, April 4, 1927. Via Newspapers.com.
26. "Around Albuquerque." Albuquerque Journal, April 6, 1927. Via Newspapers.com.
27. "Aged Man Falls to Floor When Grief Hits Him." Albuquerque Journal, November 4, 1925. Via Newspapers.com.
28. "Aged Father's Denial Given to Charge of Murdering Son." Albuquerque Journal, February 11, 1928. Via Newspapers.com.
29. "Tagliaferro's Widow Granted $8,000 Damages." Albuquerque Journal, August 24, 1928. Via Newspapers.com.
30. "Builders Propose 113 New Homes." Albuquerque Journal, October 19, 1954. Via Newspapers.com.
31. "Albuquerque's Newest and Most Modern Apartment" (advertisement). Albuquerque Journal, August 26, 1928. Via Newspapers.com.
32. "Funeral Rites for TV Actress' Father Saturday." Albuquerque Journal, December 5, 1958. Via Newspapers.com.
33. "Vivian Vance to Play Emotional Role in Final Performance Here Tuesday at Crystal Theater." Albuquerque Journal, August 14, 1932. Via Newspapers.com.
34. [Among the countless girls...] New York Daily News, September 15, 1932. Via Newspapers.com.
35. "Tagliaferro, Tony Ralph." Albuquerque Journal, October 28, 2012. Via Newspapers.com.
36. "Enlisted Record and Report of Separation: Tagliaferro Tony R" via Ancestry Library.
37. U.S. Phone and Address Directories, 1993-2002 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005. City: Albuquerque; State: New Mexico; Year(s): 2000-2001. Via Ancestry Library.
38. Shins, the. [Any car buffs...] Facebook, 2015.
39. Gold & Platinum: The Shins. RIAA.
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