Superbad

It’s getting difficult to discern whether Mona Golub is a super-sized human bed pan or simply the largest public information dike this side of the Hudson River. Price Chopper’s spokeswoman and daughter of Schenectady County Overlord Neil Golub refuses to say word one regarding rumors of the supermarket’s long-lived Railroad Place location closing, even though sources and common sense indicate the store is all but demolished.

Update: Fear not, A very reliable source asserts; there will be a grocer on Railroad Place well into the foreseeable future.

Word on the street is that morning-shift workers at the affectionately nicknamed “Ghetto Chopper” found Papa Golub and one of the city’s power brokers haggling over a price for the nearly 3-acre property in the center of Saratoga Springs. The negotiations were reportedly short and sweet.

Neil Golub: How much will you give me?

Sonny Bonacio: Here’s a dump truck loaded with $20 million in cash. Take it or leave it.

Neil Golub(doing the happy dance): Sold!

So comes to an end the tenure of the city’s longest-lived supermarket. Though Mona Golub didn’t care to “share” any details with The Saratogian Monday, just about everyone can read the writing on the wall. Ever since the Spa City underwent it’s massive gentrification during the late 90s, Ghetto Chopper has been a thorn in Golub’s side and an unsightly stopper for the towering condominium empire Bonacio has erected on top of the city’s former railroad arteriole.

Update: Enter the reliable source. In a correspondence Thursday, Bonacio didn't admit to or deny being in talks about the property. But in the event he was the running, the developer assured the market would certainly stay put. And for a very good reason, too.

“...My own mother shops there every day...”

Whoa, Sonny. Were it just the public getting riled up, I’d have my doubts. But the madre? I’ll take you for your word. Hell hath no furry like a mother scorned.

Built in 1961, the 23,000-square-foot supermarket and adjoining parking lot covered up the rotting multi-track rail yard that had gone into disuse. At the time, Price Chopper was just about the most attractive addition to an area of Saratoga largely dotted with burned-out industrial buildings.

But after economic revival in the 1980s, the store’s overall shabby appearance came to symbolize the rough-and-tumble nature of the city’s west side, an area of Saratoga known for it’s lower class and minority neighborhoods. Since the building boom of the 1990s, Ghetto Chopper has remained one of only visual legacies of the Spa City’s multi-class past; a reminder that a bustling lower and lower middle class once dwelled among the downtown region.

While it may seem shabby on the exterior, Ghetto Chopper caters to a veritable melting pot of pedestrian customers that remain as loyal to the store as their own predilections; the enviro-friendly green sneaker not wanting burn fossil fuel to buy organic granola; the ten-beer Skidmore happy hour drunk, too hammered to get behind the wheel to fetch more brews; the elderly shut-in renting a cheap Westside apartment and lacking transportation to any of the larger markets; the downtown restaurant worker darting out for several gallons of a milk the chef forgot to order; the proud homeless guy looking to redeem the morning collection of cans for a Budweiser tallboy. And the list goes on.

For Neil Golub, however, the Railroad Place store represents an unnecessary expense in a market where he clearly holds a monopoly. Despite being a four-season gold mine and clearing house for what doesn’t sell at his super-center on Route 50, Golub quite publicly views the smaller Chopper as a tax drain for his empire.

The city lists the property at $1.95 million, which is a full-market value of $2.35 million. Absent any previously arranged certioraris and at this level of assessment, Old Man Golub will need to shell out about $42,000 in taxes in 2008; $10,541 to the city, $4,204 to the county and a whopping $26,579 to the school district.

Despite Saratoga’s bustling market, Golub has bitterly contested the notion his property is valuing much more than a standard dilapidated duplex with a hole-ridden roof and collapsing foundation. In 1992, he argued the property was worth about $462,000, not $1.5 million as the city claimed. Six years later, he came back with a value of $165,000.

“After seven years of non-action, our attorneys used legal tactics to bring the issue to a head,” Golub explained in a letter to the Daily Gazette published in 1999. “Local councilmen took notice and became openly hostile.”

The city then took Golub to task with his bull-shit legal dickering. Just a month after the monolithic grocer crabbed over paying more than his fair share of taxes, the city offered him $1.65 million for his property. Golub bristled at the thought and again fired back in the press.

“I have one comment: It is not for sale. It has never been for sale. It is not for sale now. It will not be for sale next week or next month,” Golub blustered. “The people in downtown Saratoga have a great need for a store and we’ve met that need even though we opened a store just down the street.”

How soon he forgets when a dumpster load of greenbacks wheels into the Ghetto Chopper parking lot. Were Golub truly a community-minded fellow manning a community-minded corporation with the community in mind as he purports, he would have never built the Route 50 store and instead pumped much needed cash into what was once his anchor store in the Spa City. Instead, Golub is like any other corporate captain: he’s a greed-happy number-cruncher who could care less about the overall impact of his business decisions as long as it make him a dollar or several million.

Apparently joining him on the greed train is Bonacio, who still hasn’t been directly linked to this rumored sale by anything other than overwhelming circumstance. Bonacio was the developer that erected two wall-sized condominium buildings on Railroad Place. Bonacio is also the guy who commissioned the gargantuan monstrosity on Division Street right behind the aforementioned condos. And Bonacio is the guy who likes to build one property while lining up a second project to start as soon as he’s finished.

Under this thinking, he’ll finish his structure on South Broadway just in time to start demolition of the Lillian’s parking lot in 2009. Once that project is hammered into the ground, he should have all the necessary approvals in place to wreck Ghetto Chopper starting in 2010. It’s just speculation, but the type of speculating that gives poise for thought.

As usual, the people who can least afford for the market’s closure will be the last informed as much, thanks to the aforementioned public information dike. Like her father, Mona Golub is quite vicious when it comes to protecting Price Chopper’s market moves. Any scrap of information leaked from the company is done so in a carefully orchestrated way and at a point where the bartering, decision making, planning and construction processes are virtually etched in stone. The younger Golub will ensure the community has little if any say in whether the grocer remains.

Also not given much of a choice in the mater are the store’s employees, who are likely the source of the rumors printed in The Saratogian. To even the thickest of workers, it’s tough to explain away a pre-dawn meeting between the Golubs and a developer when numbers like $20 million are being batted around in the store’s pock-marked parking lot.

Hopefully, all this smoke is just the rambling nonsense of a couple of burnouts trading kicks out by the back dock during a cigarette break. Despite it’s lack-luster appearance, Ghetto Chopper truly offers an important and needed service to resident of the city. Shutting it down for another gaggle of million-dollar condominiums would be the last stake driven through the heart of the city’s working class.