Stand at the corner of Broad Branch Road and Northampton Street NW and you’ll see a pleasant zoning aberration. The building is a cream-and-white frame two-story with a broad front porch and a hanging Market sign, and it has been a corner store, in one form or another, since 1919.
Credit for this one goes to Sara, who lives in the neighborhood and asked about the market’s history.
A neighborhood that was still filling in
The original building went up in 1919, and by the market’s own history a Mr. Sauer ran it out of his home for seven years as a small grocer. It was a short run and a small operation, and it is easy to picture: a front room stocked with the basics, a residence upstairs, a corner where you could get flour and coffee without going downtown.
Chevy Chase DC was still filling in around him. Senator Francis Newlands had platted the suburb in the 1890s at the far end of the Connecticut Avenue streetcar line, and the Chevy Chase Land Company was pushing subdivisions and streets north through the twenties. The blocks around Broad Branch and Northampton were thickening year by year with new houses and new families, and a small grocer in a house on the corner had a good problem: more customers than a home operation could carry.
Enter the Bondareffs, 1926
Sauer sold the market in 1926 to Mr. and Mrs. Bondareff, and the family stayed behind the counter for the next fifty years. The market’s own history sums up the shift in one sentence. They “slowly expanded this unassuming market into a full-scale grocery store.”
The 1926 date is the one that stuck. When Ida Bondareff died in 1979, the headline on her Washington Post obituary was “Ida Bondareff, of NW Market, Dies: ‘Miss Ida’ Helped Run Family Store Since 1926.” She was 86, and the obit noted that she had “helped operate a well known family market in Northwest Washington for nearly 50 years.” Everyone in the neighborhood called her Miss Ida.
A school across the street, 1931
Five years into the Bondareffs’ run, in November 1931, Lafayette Elementary opened diagonally across the street. The Washington Post ran the ceremony the next morning under the headline “LAFAYETTE SCHOOL IS DEDICATED; LONG CAMPAIGN IS ENDED.” About 250 parents attended. A picture and a flag on their way from France failed to arrive in time, so the unveiling was pushed to a later date. The new brick school replaced a set of portable classrooms that had held the growing neighborhood’s children for years.
For Miss Ida and her family, the school changed the rhythm of the store. Kids piled onto the porch after the bell rang. Parents came for the last thing they had forgotten. The market and Lafayette became each other’s punctuation, and they still are.
“Thanks to a grandfather clause”
By the middle of the twentieth century, the city’s zoning code had caught up with the neighborhood. The blocks around 5608 were residential, no commercial storefronts allowed. But the market predated the code, and the rule that lets an existing use continue past a change in zoning kept it open. On July 10, 1975, the Washington Post District Weekly section led its cover with a note about it. “The Broad Branch Market still stands in the residential area, thanks to a grandfather clause in the zoning laws, and it’s indeed from the past.”
Inside that issue was a full profile by Susan Crowley called “A Market That’s More Than a Store.” Her opening image is the whole thing in one paragraph.
The boy’s nose barely reaches the edge of the worn countertop. He stretches up on tiptoes and peers at the lollipops, jawbreakers, chocolate bars and assorted delights, scrutinizing the shelves like a cautious investor buying stocks.
Susan Crowley, Washington Post, July 10, 1975
Miss Ida was 82 that summer. She had another three and a half years behind the counter.
Curly
The other person you would have met at the market in the Bondareff years was Mr. Percy Edwards, better known as Curly. He worked at the store for nearly fifty years. He also drove the delivery route.
Delivery was the trick the market used to beat Safeway and Piggly Wiggly, which had chain stores within a short drive. The chains offered scale. The Bondareffs offered Curly, who would run your order to your kitchen. Over the years, in the market’s own telling, he ended up with the keys to nearly every house on the route.
His photograph hangs above the register at the market today. Older neighbors on the block still bring him up. The younger ones read the caption and wonder how one deliveryman knew that many families that well.
The lights go out
The Bondareff family’s run ended in the late 1970s. Ida died Thursday, February 1, 1979 at Carriage Hill nursing home in Silver Spring, of a pulmonary embolism. The store passed out of the family and, before long, out of business. The building at 5608 Broad Branch went dark and stayed dark for a while.
Grocery consolidation had a lot to do with it. A one-porch corner store was a hard sell in the era of the strip-mall Safeway, and the delivery routes Curly had once run were now a service the chains could quietly offer through a warehouse and a phone bank. The zoning grandfather clause kept the storefront legal. It could not keep it profitable.
2008: the porch reopens
In 2008, Tracy Stannard and John Fielding bought the building and reopened it. They kept the frame and the porch and the address numerals and the general silhouette, and they built out a full-service corner grocer and prepared-foods shop underneath. The Washington Post covered the reopening in a story by April Fulton on October 8, 2008. Her lede is the reason the porch scene at the top of this post feels familiar.
On any given weekday afternoon after school lets out, the Broad Branch Market’s bulk candy counter is two feet deep with grade schoolers clamoring for malted milk balls and licorice whips while their parents are steps away, ordering dinner at the deli counter.
April Fulton, Washington Post, October 8, 2008
That is Susan Crowley’s 1975 boy at the counter, thirty-three years later, with a different candy selection and the same tiptoe. The Avalon Theatre a few blocks east on Connecticut Avenue reopened five years earlier, in 2003, on a similar bet: a neighborhood institution that predated the strip mall, saved by the neighborhood that predated the strip mall.
The call box, 2013
Five years after the reopening, a small ornamental cast-iron DC call box on the corner of McKinley Street and Broad Branch Road was restored as a historical marker. Sydney Butler and his family paid for the work. The Cahill Tully Crossland Real Estate Group of Long & Foster covered the balance, Custom Painting Specialist did the prep and paint, and the artist Nicole Bourgea painted a watercolor of the market for the marker’s face. The inscription is one sentence. “The Broad Branch Market has been a neighborhood tradition since 1919.”
A century in
The market kept its centennial quietly in 2019 and its hundred-and-first in 2020, when the deli counter kept the neighborhood fed through the first winter of the pandemic. Tracy Stannard still runs it. It is open seven days a week, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The porch still fills up when the last Lafayette bell rings.
Stand at the corner in 2026 and you are standing where Mr. Sauer opened his front-room store, where Miss Ida spent nearly fifty years behind the counter, where Curly loaded a delivery wagon at the back door, and where a boy on tiptoe still peers into the candy bins with the seriousness of a small investor.
Thanks again to Sara for the tip.