WAWA

City Safari: Intrepid Ole’ WAWA Tests The Sands Of Time.

: Store of convenience.

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Apr 08, 2020

Contributing Editor

The little WAWA at the end of my street is a life lesson in survival. Built near a large chemical plant that produced things like paint coatings, sheeting, pipes, lead paint and a variety of other lead-related chemicals, the ground under the store’s foundation was really a pile of toxic dirt, cosmetically topped with landscaper’s soil, to "protect” the neighborhood from exposure to lead.

         

It was, as they say, a thin veneer of polish, hiding a multitude of sins. The Port Richmond Shopping Center, just a stone’s throw away, was built on the site of the mammoth Anzon Factory or the creator of all this toxic mess, sometime after 1997.   

         

I moved into the area in 2002 when one could still see the walls of smaller factories lining the small streets, shooting out from nearby Aramingo Avenue.  

         

The appearance of this WAWA in a heretofore forgotten ‘triangle’ on the edge of Port Richmond and Fishtown, was a cause for celebration among local residents. ‘Civilization’ had finally come to a remote neighborhood, where the only restaurant outlets were mom and pop luncheonettes and the bigger Polish establishments on Allegheny Avenue. Construction of the WAWA was swift and furious. The buried lead deposits under clean topsoil created a mountain of sorts that became known as Mount Wawa, where on snowy winter days bundled up kids, looking like characters out of Dickens, took their sleds and toboggans for semi-toxic joy rides. 

         

Looking back over the history of this little WAWA, I can say that it has survived the travails of many structural tragedies that parallel, in some respects, to what we humans are battling, with the COVID-19 crisis.

         

This little WAWA had a few good years after it was built. It employed mostly neighborhood people and was not yet a citywide attraction. It was rarely crowded; its parking lot was never full, and the gas station out front had a much more leisurely pace. There was even a free air pump for car and bicycle tires in a remote section of the parking lot. WAWA management thought of everything. 

         

Over time the lower rungs of humanity abused the air pump so that it was finally removed. The homeless discovered this WAWA as a safe haven for panhandling, holding doors for customers for that hoped-for small tip. It wasn’t long before the lower rungs of homeless started to abuse the doors and lash out at customers who wouldn’t give them money. WAWA’s portable outdoor cigarette butt containers provided access to discarded butts so in many ways this WAWA retained its status as an oasis for those without a home. 

         

Over the years I’ve seen a hundred or more managers pass through this WAWA. One manager became a friend of mine and we would often trade WAWA stories. He’d talk about the growing problem of shoplifting there, especially about desperate men who would steal cartons of Red Bull or candy bars. They say that you can always tell a good store by how many long-term employees it has. WAWA kept its employees; the turnover rate was very low. 

  Enter the first WAWA disaster, called the underground lead-in-the-soil plague.

         

It was this little WAWA’s waterloo or COVID-19 crisis. In 2017, The Philadelphia Inquirerreported, "The former brownfield is now an asphalt-covered retail hub with an Applebee’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Rite Aid, AutoZone, and Wawa. Rather than hauling away the toxic mound, the developer was allowed to cap it with a foot or more of clean dirt and plant grass.”

         

The gig was over; something had to be done.  

         

The Inquirerrevealed that "Reporters recently tested a patch of bare soil at the apron of Mount Wawa. Its lead level came back at 2,904 ppm, more than seven times the allowable limit for areas where children play.”

         

The danger spread far beyond the confines of the store. Lead-soil contamination popped up all over the area. New homebuyers when they heard of the crisis opted out of sale agreements. As for WAWA, the store was masked or closed for a long period of time while the ground around the store was dug up and the contaminated soil underneath carted away in dump trucks. The reconstruction process took months. Rumors on the street had this WAWA at death’s door. Many said the store would close forever. When the dump trucks finally left the area, WAWA breathed freely again although it was hit by another wave shortly after that—all of the contaminated materials had not been removed--so the little store was put on a ventilator. 

         

"It’s dead this time,” many said. "No way can that store come back.” 

         

In the meantime, the old mom and pop stores in the area experienced a short rebirth but gentrification was moving in rapidly and taking out the quaint luncheonettes one by one. In their place one found out-of-scale 300-400k four story cheap construction utility houses.   

         

WAWA’s reopening was celebrated once again until another disaster struck.

         

This time the closure was due to much needed floor repairs. A new floor seemed like a good thing even if the relative young age of the store made one wonder what happened to make the old floor old.

         

Whatever the reason, WAWA reopened yet again. What followed was a boom in the store’s popularity. The heretofore relatively quiet WAWA was now an area magnet. People were driving there from other parts of the city as if this was the only WAWA in the city. What was going on? Cars piled up at the gas station. People were driving from Delaware and New Jersey. Many would sit in parked cars in the surrounding spacious parking lot. Here was urban life at its most mysterious: Drug dealers, drug buyers, cars of lost kids from surrounding states driving to this WAWA just to hang around the parking lot. It soon became known as WAWA Babylon with its own mountain nearby.    

         

It became necessary to employ security guards. WAWA suddenly had a new face. The guards would walk around the store all night long and check into all those black tinted window parked cars.  

         

Another structural COVID-19 crisis hit when that old WAWA floor mystery was finally revealed: the store had a water leakage problem. Water was apparently leaking up into the store near the kitchen where they made the take-out food. The store was closed, its reopening date "to be announced.”

         

Fake people in the fake news orbit said the problem was rats: rats running across the store, getting into the pre-wrapped chicken salad sandwiches, eating the soft pretzels or attempting to suck out soda from the soda bar.

         

Other fakes said the problem was raw sewage leaking up from a faulty plumbing system. Ironically, this was about the time when WAWA stopped selling toilet paper.  

         

The store was all but pronounced dead but the fact is the little store just wouldn’t die. It closed for one week to alleviate the problem, reopened for a day but closed again, reopened and closed again for a good two or more weeks. All seemed lost. Then it reopened for 3 days only to close again until finally the full crisis hit: it shut down for nearly a month so that the flooding problem could be brought under control.

         

The sewage and the rats and the molten lead fires in the WAWA kitchen!

         

The weight of the quarantine caused long-term employees—I’m especially thinking of a woman in a beehive hairdo who worked the lead register who became the face of the store---to quit her job. Employees began to come and go like people talking of Michelangelo. The poor WAWA had once again come within an inch of its life. 

         

When covid-19 hit, WAWA posted social distance signs and reconfigured its self-serve coffee bar so that only employees could dispense coffee. No more than ten people at a time were allowed in the store. Disaster struck again when an employee tested positive for COVID-19. This news hit the broadcast media like a bomb. WAWA was again put under wraps. The new order of things became ordering in advance on a WAWA phone app. The store was dead for days until, magically, it reopened, sans its full service fresh food service. 

         

Today this WAWA is less crowded. There are no tinted black window cars from Delaware or New Jersey, no lingering homeless asking for handouts, no groups of friends kibitzing out front with large frozen drinks. At the most you’ll see is a very bored looking security guard standing outside playing with his phone.