Liquor Stores Of The Lower Haight: Abe's Market

Liquor Stores Of The Lower Haight: Abe's MarketAbe Fattah. (Photos: Hoodline / Diane Zimmer)
Diane Zimmer
Published on May 26, 2015

For the past 25 years, Lower Haight residents have been grateful for the presence of Abe’s Market at 378 Fillmore St. (at Page) — especially those interested in saving a trip down the hill to Haight Street or up to Oak.

Abe’s Market was bought by Abe (Ibrahim) Fattah and his son Nael in 1990, with his wife also occasionally stepping in to help. Abe and his family originally immigrated to San Francisco from São Paulo, Brazil in 1973 after fleeing violence in Palestine several years earlier. Nael was less than a year old, and had two older sisters. Two more daughters were born a few years after the family arrived in California.

Prior to purchasing the market on Fillmore and Page, Abe ran a similar store at 24th and Mission (currently the home of Chinese Food and Donuts). After that store burned down in 1981, Abe purchased a supermarket at 41st and Taraval with his brothers. But as sometimes happens when families go into business together, they parted ways in 1985 after some disagreements.

Abe then purchased a small market at Pine and Webster with his son Nael, now a teenager, joining him after school and on weekends. The store's dairy delivery man tipped the Fattahs off to the fact that the owner of a market at Page and Fillmore was having some legal trouble with the state's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, and Abe decided to make an offer.

Nael recalls the early 1990s as a much different time in the Lower Haight/Western Addition.

"There was so much drug dealing, alcoholics, riff-raff. When my dad and I would open the store at 7am, people would be waiting outside to buy liquor. My dad and I always worked together" he said, unlike today when they work separate shifts.

“At least twice a month people would come in asking them to call the police because they had been mugged ... We’ve been robbed twice, both in the first 10 years. Hold-ups. Once I was with my dad, and once with my mom.”

Nael said that customers walking to the store at night would often walk in the middle of the street, as drug dealers and potential muggers would hang out in the unlit doorways and garages of Page Street.

There were also turf wars between rival drug dealers. Nael described a midday incident in the early '90s when a car pulled a U-turn right in front of the market, stopped, shot four times down the street, and drove away. He and a customer were in front of the store at the time and had to quickly duck down behind the door.

Nael Fattah

When asked what changed in the neighborhood, Nael pointed to the projects closing, referring to the demolition of the Hayes Valley South Public Housing Project at Haight and Buchanan in 1996 and its replacement with more modern, mixed-income buildings.

San Francisco Chronicle stories from the time have police describing the projects' maze-like configuration and dark stairwells as a haven for drug dealers and other criminals. Former Mayor and then regional manager for HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) Art Agnos described the buildings as infested with rats and roaches and littered with garbage.

Nael said he saw the biggest transition between 1995 and 2001, a period when he says the neighborhood became much more gentrified and less diverse. While he welcomed a safer neighborhood, some of the changes have been harder to endure. 

“The worst thing is the rent has gone out of control; a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck. Then you have the techies, those who work at Apple and Google. I was talking to a friend who runs a market right by one of the commuter bus stops. She couldn’t understand for the longest time why this whole crowd would be there every day outside her store but not buy anything. Finally she figured it out: [the companies] feed their people, so the tech workers don’t come into the store, they don’t buy soda or snacks. Maybe some beer on weekends, but that’s it.”

“It’s also hard because I was born and raised here, went to high school in San Francisco," he added. "But now all my friends are out of the City. Concord, Brentwood. They just can’t afford it.”

But the best thing about running a small corner market for 25 years? For Nael, and anybody who's become a regular at Abe’s , that’s easy. “You get to interact with everybody!”

For another story of the Lower Haight's liquor stores, see our previous profile of O'Looney's Market.