20 years after a deadly robbery, a neighborhood market is reborn

By Diana Lu

Muhammed Aslam died in the South Philadelphia business he built.

It was a cold December evening in 1999 and the shop owner’s son, Zakria, then 12, had just gone to their apartment upstairs to fetch dinner while Muhammed stayed downstairs in the family’s small Southeast Asian food and spice market. In those few minutes, a robber entered the 2330 S. 7th Street shop and shot him. Aslam was number 292 in a list of homicides in the city that year published by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Aslam Market stayed open. For nearly 20 years, Zak Aslam and his mother Irshad have maintained the small grocery, a stalwart as South 7th Street has bloomed into the commercial soul of Philly’s Southeast Asian and Central American immigrant communities. Without even a sign or placard, word of mouth spread for immigrant families to shop at the unmarked S. 7th Street storefront.

This fall, the Community Design Collaborative and the Philadelphia Department of Commerce recognized Aslam Market at the 10th annual Storefront Challenge Awards, a citywide contest that celebrates remarkable storefront facade improvements. The business received the ‘Amazing Awnings’ award, and the two steadfast community advocates who worked with the family on projects inside and outside were individually honored with the ‘Instigator’ award and ‘Corridor Catalyst’ award.

Aslam Market’s story signifies how small boosts of funding, coupled with personable technical support, can help stabilize and heal a neighborhood.

On a sunny day in October, shortly after the Storefront Challenge, I went down to South 7th Street to take a walk along the corridor with Somaly Osteen and Andy Toy from the Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition(SEAMAAC). Our first stop: Aslam Market.

For the uninitiated, Aslam Market is a treasure trove of unique staples such as Nepalese dumpling — momo— mix, Indian sweets, Burmese sweet curry, and Indonesian instant noodles. Everyday ingredients that, when you are worlds away from home, bring back the familiar tastes of childhood.

The store started off selling Indian and American groceries and became known for a few items. When customers started to ask for specific products, Zak Aslam would find them and stock them on the shelves. Aslam’s vendors, in turn, started noticing the shift and began offering a wider variety of products. The market even became the spot for gyro carts to get their special spice blends.

The Aslam family has been South Philly for generations and neighborhood commerce is part of their story. Muhammed Aslam’s uncle passed the storefront, then a furniture store, down to his father. “Mom and Pops ran the market…and we lived upstairs,” Zak Aslam recalls.  Zak now runs a second business, a pizza shop started by his mother, and owns a Sunoco station as well. His daughter’s hot pink power wheels convertible, complete with big balloons, is parked next to the spices. “I can’t buy her a real Mercedes,” Zak says with a laugh. “She’s two!”

Building trust takes a neighborhood

When Aslam Market received the funds from the Philadelphia Commerce Department to update its facade, the new vibrant blue awning symbolized more than a storefront makeover. It showcases a family business’ steady trust in its neighborhood organization and recognition of their role on the corridor.

South 7th Street has ebbed and flowed, Irshad and Zak tell me. At night and in broad daylight, they have seen open drug use, prostitution, and people scavenging through trash that litters the street. Why doesn’t this get reported to the police? “Many people here are immigrants and they’ve been afraid to speak up,” Zak explains. “Or they don’t know who to report to.” For many refugees who fled oppressive regimes or war, police and government represent danger. This makes the community both vulnerable to crime and overlooked for services, he says. Furthermore, the communities tend to keep to themselves, the Aslams say, and many people keep to blocks that they are familiar with, making it difficult to organize under a unifying identity when advocating for funds or services. The surrounding neighborhoods, centered by Mifflin Square Park, speak 21 different languages, PlanPhilly’s Catalina Jaramillo reported in 2016.

Is there an identity for South 7th Street?  Zak believes that the businesses make the corridor distinct yet there isn’t the support for neighborhood branding and commercial expansion that help similar areas thrive. They fall in an in-between — too many resources for government programs that target the poorest neighborhoods and not enough money to do it alone. “I know there are poorer [neighborhoods],” he says, “but we’re poor too and we have businesses [worth supporting].”

The Aslams’ observations are not off. “South Philly is a great example of a true mixed-income, multi-ethnic community, where the average resident is middle class, but there are also many wealthy families and just as many in poverty,” says James Onofrio, the Community Development Corporations Manager for the Commerce Department. However, he adds, “poverty is concentrated in pockets, and ethnic groups (especially immigrants) are also very concentrated, sometimes down to the block level.” This stratification of affiliations plays out in social services, and perception of ‘services for whom’: “Some of the broader neighborhood-serving organizations like neighborhood councils and civics are perceived to be exclusive or ‘only for Americans’ by immigrant groups,”  Onofrio explains. Beyond that, “leadership of these organizations is concentrated in the hands of a few well-connected, politically active long-term residents.” Word of mouth—about an organization or program—is crucial for credibility.

What is necessary, then, are the human links between the businesses, the residents, and the money.

Enter the instigator

‘Free money’ to help their business sounded too good to be true, Osteen, SEAMAAC’s community development specialist, explains. Through the Commerce Department’s Storefront Improvement Program (SIP), which aims to incentivize commercial property owners along our targeted commercial corridors to improve their facades, Aslam Market was eligible for a 50 percent reimbursement. The impact and opportunity for small businesses that receive these funds cannot be overstated. As Patricia Blakely, the former executive director for The Merchants Fund, a private foundation that provides financial assistance to Philadelphia businesses facing hardship, put simply: “SIP is one of [Philadelphia’s] most powerful civic tools to invest in our corridors and small businesses. Upgrading the facade of a business is a marketing and branding investment that says to potential customers either come in or go away. Add some lighting and you are increasing neighborhood safety as well.” However, there is fine print. The business would need to pay for the full cost upfront, supply bids from several contractors, show proof of payment and services, and be clear of any outstanding taxes and liens.

In the Aslams’ case, the family had become entangled in accumulating back taxes from when Irshad Aslam used all of her available funds to help her son open his business. “She fell behind on taxes and the interest and penalties were piled on top,” Toy explained. SEAMAAC worked with the family to trace back the fees and develop a payment plan with the city that allowed some of the interest and penalties to be waived. “None of this is possible without a lot of care, trust and relationship building, time, understanding of the systems…and staffing at the ground level,” Toy says. It took more than a year to remedy the back taxes, apply for the program, and select the contractor for the job. The nonprofit also lent the business the money upfront to pay for the facade improvements until the city issued the reimbursement, another hiccup for small businesses with limited funds.

To then take money from a government agency, and to trust the translator at your door to surrender your financial documents, fears, and confusing mountain of debt, is no small feat. For many immigrant-owned businesses, the dominant culture is cash. This can be for a variety of reasons ranging from a lack of trust in banks or government dating back to experiences in a home country to the need to move around quickly (and often discreetly), and, if there is anyone in the network who is undocumented, a desire to keep money within a small trusted network. While this instinct can be a survival tactic, it also means that many immigrant-owned businesses do not have a record of borrowing that allows them to take part in many of the services offered by the city to boost businesses in exactly their situation.

The Commerce Department tries to work around the delicate dynamic. “Often, low-income and immigrant corridors require unique and strategic efforts to increase awareness, so specialized outreach and assistance in applying to our programs is necessary,” says Giana Lawrence-Primus, who manages SIP. “We know that immigrant entrepreneurs are driving growth throughout the city and we want to continue to support that growth,” Lawrence-Primus continues, crediting SEAMAAC, and Osteen’s corridor management skills in particular, for the increase in SIP participation in the area. “South 7th Street is a big win for us, and that project will have a short-term and long-term economic impact on the corridor.”