Tomorrow will be a very special day in the city of Chester. A historic day.
They will throw open the doors at Fair & Square, the nation's first nonprofit supermarket. It's the work of Philabundance, which has made getting food into the hands of people who desperately need it something of an art form.
When the doors swing open on Saturday, it will officially end more than a decade of wandering in what the federal government calls a "food desert." The city earned that tag because it did not have a full-service supermarket within its borders.
The city has lots of corner stores, but until Saturday not a single supermarket.
Fair & Square is not only bringing food to the city, but desperately needed jobs.
Sixty-nine people will be employed there, 82 percent of them Chester residents.
Amazingly, Fair & Square will soon have competition. The city that for more than a decade had no supermarkets will have two when Bottom Dollar opens a store in 2014.
It is a monumental day in the city, one that comes at a particularly tough moment.
There is a sign on the wall inside the supermarket that states, "This is Chester."
This was Chester, too, last night in the parking lot of the Rite Aid, where they gathered to honor the memory of store manager Jason Scott McClay, who was gunned down in the store a week ago.
His homicide marked the 22 in the county this year. Of those, 15 have occurred in Chester.
Just an hour after the vigil broke up, gunfire again sounded on a Chester street. A man was shot several times in the chest on the unit block of East 23rd Street. He was rushed to Crozer-Chester Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
Chester continues to have its challenges.
It will have one less today, when Fair & Square puts an end to more than a decade of wandering in the desert for city residents looking for groceries.
They can't open the doors fast enough.
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