Rosner’s Grocery Store

686 Grand Avenue (demolished)

Rosner’s Food Market c. 1950s. Photo courtesy Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven.

 

Eli and Sarah Rosner with son Russell 1932. Photo courtesy Scott Rosner.

Rosner’s Grocery store was a popular neighborhood establishment started in the 1930s by Eli Rosner, a Jewish immigrant from Austria who eventually owned and operated eight grocery stores across the New Haven area. All the stores served the ethnically diverse working-class community that developed around area factories. Rosner’s was known for allowing customers to shop on credit, as did many other businesses in the neighborhood during the lean years of the Great Depression. Customers would write out the list of items they wanted to buy, as well as the price and the date they got the items. On the following Friday, when workers got their paychecks, Rosner’s customers would pay for their purchases. Alphonse Proto, in his memoir It Was Grand!, recalls that Rosner’s grocery store had open barrels of pickles and olives so that customers could reach in and help themselves to snacks. Eli’s grandson Scott Rosner remembers that when Sally’s Apizza was just starting, Eli would let the now-famous Wooster Street pizzeria take whatever supplies it needed and pay whenever the restaurant’s revenues improved. In the early 1950s, Eli branched out to start Grocer’s Wholesale on the west side of New Haven. Eli passed away in 1962 at age 61; his two sons, Russell and Eddie, operated the store until it closed in the mid-1980s. The Grand Avenue property was acquired and demolished by the New Haven Redevelopment Agency in the 1960s.

Text sources: Interview with Scott Rosner conducted by Rhoda Zahler Samuel; New Haven Building Archive, Link; Proto, Alphonse, It Was Grand! New Haven’s St. Patrick’s Church, Hamilton Street School and Memories of a Unique Neighborhood 1940-1966. Foz LLC, 2019, p.74.