(NYT)...It seems that anyone you talk to in the streets around Progress Plaza, a tattered shopping center in a mainly black, poor part of North Philadelphia, is excited. There has not been a supermarket nearby since the last one in the plaza suddenly shut down in 1999, part of a nationwide flight from blighted urban areas by many large chains. But soon a large Fresh Grocer supermarket is set to open here. “Everybody will be so happy to see a new store,” said Anna Keller, a retired nurse’s aide, as she took home a large bag of items from Popeyes, the fast-food chicken restaurant, in the plaza. In the last seven years, Ms. Keller said, she has driven miles away to shop “because the food around here isn’t worth buying.” But that also means that she has shopped less frequently and often relied on takeout. “I know I’ll eat better,” she said, talking about the ready access to aisles of fresh produce and meats. “I know this greasy food is killing me.” Carol Smith, 50, who sat on the stoop of her apartment in a rundown row house, minding her five grandchildren, said she felt the same way. Like many of her neighbors, Ms. Smith does not drive, and she has been walking the 12 blocks to the nearest grocery store, then paying a livery car to drive her back. “It’s hard to keep real fresh things around,” she said. Depopulation and the loss of industrial jobs in recent decades have taken an especially harsh toll in this neighborhood. They left row houses abandoned or in disrepair, and vacant lots strewn with trash, broken whiskey pints and hypodermic needles. Progress Plaza, which was founded with great hopes in the 1960s by an association of black residents, fell on hard times. Even mom-and-pop stores are rare. Subsidized development is starting to bring in new houses and families, a longtime development of black-owned homes has survived to the east of the plaza, and nearby Temple University is expanding. But still, within a half-mile radius of the plaza, 39 percent of people live below the poverty line, more than twice the rate for Philadelphia over all.

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