Hudson Market is a small convenience store on the corner of Hudson and Sycamore streets, smack in the middle of the Armory District. The neighborhood is the hottest new corner in Providence – a community of working-class and artsy-style blacks, Latinos, Southeast Asians and whites, living closely in roughly 20 square blocks surrounding the 97-year-old Cranston Street Armory.
The neighborhood association works out of a converted gasoline station on Westminster Street and the area boasts three community gardens. A pickup soccer game is played every evening in Armory Park, next to a playground where children and parents play and relax.
The Armory District offers much of what is best about city living – and the Armory District’s heart beats in the Hudson Market. With plank wood floors, ceiling fans, daily sandwich specials written on a chalkboard and a beveled marble counter, the shop is a throwback to an earlier day, when mothers sent their children to the local mom-and-pop for milk.
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And yet the market is a reflection of this gritty, vibrant urban neighborhood. On a recent morning, a young man wearing a pick in his Afro and fuzzy electric blue slippers on his feet exchanged pleasantries with an aging hippie with blue eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard. One customer buying a newspaper and ice cream dropped off a rent check for his landlord to pick up later that day. Jim Quinn, a part-time employee who used to own Hudson Market with his girlfriend, took a break from stocking shelves to feed hot dogs to a neighbor’s pit bull.
We’re talking Norman Rockwell, dropped into a 21st century hip urban neighborhood.
"I’ve heard so many people say, well, I’m having a crappy day. I’m just gonna’ go down to the market and have a cup of coffee for a while and it’ll work itself out," said Khym Carmichael, who now owns Hudson Market with her husband John. "It’s not my market – it’s like the neighborhood’s market. It’s this completely organic place."
The little grocery store and its little community have come of age together – earlier this year, the online magazine "CNN/Money" singled out the Armory neighborhood when it named Providence ‘Best Place To Live in the Northeast.’
It wasn’t always so. In 1987, when Jim Quinn and his girlfriend Nanci Courtney bought the building at 68 Hudson Street, a prostitute claimed the corner as her own real estate, and lots filled with hills of tires marked the surrounding landscape. The building, a Victorian built in the 1880s as a residence, was raised a floor in 1922 to accommodate a corner store. But by the 1960s the upper floors were vacated, and the graffiti-covered market was selling just candies, cigarettes and soda.
Quinn and Courtney moved in upstairs, and began a major rehab project that was financed by a grant of $30,000 from the Providence Preservation Society Revolving Fund. In the mid-1980s, the Armory Revival Co., the Providence Preservation Society, the West Broadway Neighborhood Association and individuals committed to bringing back the neighborhood began what amounted to a two-pronged approach for urban renewal: economic development and historic restoration.
In 1989, the city awarded Quinn and Courtney a ‘Keep Providence Beautiful Proud Business Award.’ Four years later, the Providence Preservation Society gave the couple a Preservation Award after their completed renovation of the store and building. In 1999, the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. included photographs and historical documents of Hudson Market in its exhibit "The Corner Store."
Enter, John and Khym Carmichael, who showed up on the scene in 1998, when they moved to the Armory neighborhood from upstate New York. John, a Johnson and Wales University-trained chef, had gotten a job cooking at Mohegan Sun Resort and Casino. Khym, who had worked most recently as the manager of a hair salon in Ithaca, took a job as a clerk at Hudson Market.
They bought the market last year from Quinn and Courtney, who were parting ways after a 15-year relationship. The Carmichaels, musicians with their own band, Stella Mudslide, got a seven-year loan from a bank and bought the store.
The Carmichaels have been there ever since, surrounded by a staff of four that are neighbors and friends as much as coworkers. Jim Quinn, who laughingly referred to himself as "the old corner dog," stayed on as an employee after selling the shop. Tawana Brace, a photographer who has worked at Hudson Market for several years, lives three blocks away. Eric Suggs, 28 years old, has been working at Hudson Market for 13 years. Allison Kyner, a painter, started working part-time at the market when she became Quinn’s downstairs neighbor.
Jeff Ward, who lives across the street and owns the bar Jerky’s, in downtown Providence, is a regular for iced coffee in the summer, hot coffee in the winter, and the occasional barbecued chicken sandwich.
A nine-year-old with a head full of braids in little blue rubber bands leaned comfortably against a newspaper stand. The girl said she has made daily runs to Hudson Market for her mother practically since she could walk, but that she wouldn’t be coming for much longer – her mom was moving the family to Atlanta.
"She don’t want us to stay here no more, ‘cause we get into too much trouble in Providence," the girl explained. "I got into trouble on Knox Street, ‘cause I called this girl nappy. I said, ‘you’re nappy be happy.’ But she got mad at me, so I pushed her."
After a 15-minute visit during which the girl bought nothing, she left the store. Khym Carmichael said she was sorry to see the girl and her siblings go.
"They’ve just been kind of growing up around us. She’s a tough little kid, but I always have nice conversations with her, believe it or not," she said, smoking a cigarette and drinking a coffee in the entrance of the store, which acts as a virtual parlor for the neighborhood.
It was 3:45 p.m., and Khym Carmichael was enjoying a rare lull in the action – as usual, there had been a steady line of patrons at the counter all afternoon. The store does a lot of business, but the Carmichaels are not planning on retiring soon. They give themselves a weekly paycheck, and they pay the bills on time, but not more, said Khym Carmichael.
"We don’t need a whole lot to live on; we got rid of our cable. I balance the checkbooks as often as I can," she said.
Still, the Carmichaels pay their employees between $8.50 and $12 an hour, and provide them all with health insurance – paying 80 percent of the premium for their full-time staff and 60 percent for the part-timers. They pay time and a half on Sundays and holidays.
Additionally, the Carmichaels have continued Quinn and Courtney’s practice of slipping the clerks some bonus cash after the first week of each month, when Hudson Market is mobbed with patrons using food stamp cards. Carmichael estimates that one quarter of the market’s revenue is generated by welfare business.
"If they worked their butts off, I’ll slip them a $20. Jim did the same for me," she said. "I’m not saying we don’t want to make a profit at all. I’d love to make a profit some day."
The Carmichaels’ business habits are not the best way to maximize profits. But perhaps they are the best way to run a healthy small business for many years – they have loyal, happy employees and scores of satisfied local customers.
"When we bought the market, we talked a lot about just the idea of knowing your neighbors, of having a place to meet and hang out. That’s kind of a dying thing," explained Khym Carmichael. "We decided to do this in our lives, so we’re definitely playing a part in it. We signed the papers and we bought the market, but the market belongs to something bigger. Our job is just to keep it rolling."
