Allen Street Market, curbside produce program to resume

THURSDAY, April 16 — Browsing a local grocery store, once a leisurely social ritual, has turned into a calculated risk. Suddenly, the prospect of buying fresh produce outdoors, in a spacious parking lot, or picking up a box weekly at curbside, with no human interaction at all, is looking better than ever.

Two popular food programs offered by the Allen Neighborhood Center, the Allen Farmers’ Market and Veggie Box, took off like rockets when the coronavirus hit in March and will resume next week after a two-week hiatus.

Veggie Box, a consortium of local farmers offering curbside pickup of locally grown vegetables, and the weekly Allen Farmers’ Market, were suspended in early April when a staffer at the Allen Neighborhood Center tested positive for the virus.

The market will re-open April 22, with beefed up hygiene and distancing measures in place. Spring subscribers to Veggie Box will be able to pick up their goodies Tuesday, April 21 and Thursday, April 23.  There is room for 65 subscribers for the 14-week summer Veggie Box period, from June 4 to Sept. 3. Registration closes May 15.

Another Allen Neighborhood Center food program, Breadbasket Pantry, will also re-open next week. The pantry, which offers free baked goods to east side residents, will be open from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, April 20. 

Instead of turning the Allen Farmers’ Market into a no-man’s-land, the coronavirus only made it stronger. Before the interruption, the market was averaging 200 visitors a week, higher than usual for March.

Usually, the market does not move outdoors until mid-May, but vendors felt safer outdoors, 20 feet apart, with six feet of distance between patrons.

“We’re seriously enforcing distance requirements and other hygienic practices,” Allen Neighborhood Center director Joan Nelson said. Bathrooms and doorknobs are sanitized frequently and the money handlers changed gloves with each transaction.

The wide-open, reassuringly distanced expanse of the market, and the minimization of middlemen, look better than ever.

“People would prefer to buy directly from a farmer who has picked stuff that morning, rather than something purchased from a grocery store, that has traveled 1,500 miles and was handled by stock crew and who knows how many shoppers,” Nelson said.

When the market is in full swing, there are about 15 farmers and 15 other vendors offering cheese, meat, flowers and other local products.

However, the biggest new star in the Allen Neighborhood Center’s constellation of programs is Veggie Box, which has grown by 2,000 percent in the past four years, to over 400 subscribers a year. 

The program does more than furnish East Side residents (and beyond) with greens, herbs, beets, onions, strawberries, apples, peaches and much more. Nelson said the program channeled about $160,000 in payments to 30 local farmers last year.

The program offers weekly boxes of eight to ten varieties of locally grown vegetables to a limited number of subscribers. The boxes were formerly delivered to a dozen area pickup spots, but now are available for curbside pickup only at the Allen Farmers’ Market parking lot at 1611 E. Kalamazoo St. Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Local goods other than produce, including cheese, eggs, meat, coffee and sweets from local producers, can be added to the boxes at an extra cost, turning the program into a virtual weekly shop. The basic box is $22.50 a week, but low-income, subsidized subscriptions are available for $5 a week. 

Meanwhile, the Allen Neighborhood Center’s plans to build Allen Place, a major renovation of its current offices and a row of empty storefronts along the 1600 block of Washington Avenue, is going full steam ahead.

The project includes 21 mixed-income, “age-friendly” apartments, a food co-op, an accelerator kitchen, a medical clinic and culinary school. 

Earlier this year, the project earned an $850,000 grant from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to clean up the contaminated soil inherited from a gas station, a dry-cleaners and an engine repair shop. 

Targeted demolition is set to begin in May, with groundbreaking in early June and completion planned for summer 2021.

The build-out includes plans for a new 800-square foot washing and packing kitchen, just to handle burgeoning Veggie Box orders.

The farmer’s market will move to a new spot on Michigan Avenue when the demolition begins.