A Great Thing Called Progress

Joe Londrico’s “J &L Open Air Market” is a third generation Cleveland institution, that has grown from a small family business, on a little piece of Euclid Avenue between the railroad tracks and the Food Coop at the edge of Little Italy, into the largest Christmas tree wholesale business in Ohio. Half of the local churches and youth groups get their trees from Joe, or one of the satellites that his boys have staked out in the first and second ring suburbs. J & L Market is also the place for concord grapes and all manner of squash in the summer, and is, by far, the best October pumpkin patch that the city has to offer.

“We buy ‘em a thousand up on tractor trailers,” Joe’s son grins, as we walk through a half acre of the prettiest Frazier firs you could ever ask for. “Funny how the price comes down when you get to be the farms’ largest customer,” he boasts, as he leads us through a half mile of Scotch, White, and Nova Scotia pine, past hundreds of Blue Spruce, still bound in nets from the grower, to look at another dozen Fraziers, that the family sets aside for their long-time customers.

At this point, the aroma of evergreen has moved from fragrant to sacred, and completely covers the oily grime of the city’s exhaust; its sweetness masking a tire burning somewhere along the railroad tracks, three fast food kitchens, several hospital chimneys, the kerosene generators at the construction site across the street, multiple piles of bus-stop cigarette butts, a river of stale beer wafting from the corner bar, and cat pee on an old sofa left by the side of the road.

The acres of live pine, freshly acquired from seven states, send forth a dizzying, forest-full of sweet perfume, and giddy, free oxygen molecules into the warm light rain, magically melting two hundred years of progress like locally mined road salt on dirty wet snow.

Without the benefit of reindeer, dimming lights, or a musical interlude, the scene shifts without warning, and I am suddenly alone, standing silently next to a fine Cherokee Appaloosa mare, on pine straw and oak thatch, at the bottom of the hill, less than a mile from the lake, at a time in Cuyahoga history when sleigh bells and hand saws were the only sounds of progress, and you could readily smell game, your neighbor’s fire and the changing season on the evening wind.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Jeffrey Bowen jeffreybowenAThotmail.com
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