Deachman: ‘We’ve had a really good run’ — ByWard Fruit Market to close this spring

Isaac Farbiasz, shown here, and Miriam Farbiasz have operated the ByWard Fruit Market for 26 years. It’s the last of the brick-and-mortar green grocers in the Market. Photo by Tony Caldwell /POSTMEDIAArticle content

“Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.”
— The Song of Solomon, 2:5.

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For a little over a quarter of a century, Isaac and Miriam Farbiasz and their ByWard Fruit Market store have stood as mainstays in the ByWard Market, enduring anchors of the bustling food retail scene that for more than a century was the district’s beating heart.

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The 26 years the couple have operated their store — they bought it in 1999 — is just the tip of the iceberg at 36 ByWard Market Square. A black-and-white photo in the shop’s front window shows onetime owner M.Z. Lithwick in the doorway of the same grocery store, in 1930. How far back it was a grocer’s is unclear; It’s been Greenberg’s Fruit Store and Greenberg and Weltman. In the early 1920s, it was Fraser’s, specializing in butter, eggs and potatoes. In the 1880s, it was Dominion Flour store.

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But things have changed — things are constantly changing — and soon, ByWard Fruit Market, the last brick-and-mortar greengrocer in the Market, will be gone, its doors shuttered briefly before something else takes its place. For the next five or six weeks, until Easter, the Farbiaszes will operate their business as usual, after which the “dismantling,” as Isaac describes it, will occur, a clearance sale with the last vestiges expected to disappear by the end of May.

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“The ByWard Market is a market in history and name only,” says Isaac. “It’s not coming back to what it was,” an assertion that a quick walk along the historic block of ByWard Market Square between George and York streets supports. Long gone, for those who even remember, are the likes of Zunders Fruitland, Budapest Delicatessen and Slipacoff’s Premium Meats. The string of colourful outdoor farmers’ stalls has been reduced to a single one. More recently, in 2023, The House of Cheese closed, followed by Saslove’s Meat Market last fall. Many have been replaced by restaurants, bars or takeout foods.

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“Food retail,” says Isaac, “is being replaced by food ingestion.”

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The closing of Saslove’s in particular is a reminder of the tenuous yet important synergy between like businesses in an area. With no butcher left in the Market last December, there were, for the first time in living memory, no customers in the Market buying Christmas turkeys. That absence was felt down the street by the Farbiaszes, as fewer people came to their shop for the assorted potatoes, yams, herbs, beans, Brussels sprouts, mushrooms, carrots and what-have-you that might accompany those stuffed birds come Christmas Day.

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Food retail is being replaced by food ingestion.Article content

“Without Saslove’s, those customers simply stopped coming,” Isaac laments. “We weren’t losing money — until this past year. And once we did, we knew it was time. We’ve accepted that. We’ve had a really good run.”

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Perhaps it’s Isaac’s scientific background in biochemistry that allows him to cite some of the factors that contributed to the store’s closure without betraying even a note of bitterness.