It was not the first time that 816 Somerset had burned.
More than a century ago, during the Great Fire of 1900, the property — then a home owned by lumberman Matthew Cochrane — was reduced to ashes. Mr. Cochrane rebuilt with the help of a $750 grant from a civic relief fund, and in keeping with a new bylaw, his new home was made of brick, not wood.
In succeeding decades, the building would serve as both home and business for a parade of newcomers. They came from countries afflicted by poverty and war: Russia, Germany, Italy and Cambodia.
The immigrants often arrived with little education and few words of English. But all found on Somerset an unpretentious, working-class neighbourhood — and a red-brick building with which to earn for themselves a small share of Canada’s prosperity.
While sailing to Canada in search of a better life than the one he had known in western Russia, Alex Fonberg met the woman who would become his wife.
Ida Dworkin was from Odessa — then a part of western Russia — and was travelling with her mother after being sponsored by relatives in Ottawa. It was sometime in the early 1900s, possibly during the early stages of the First World War. (The descendants of Ida and Alex Fonberg are unsure of the exact date of that ocean crossing.)
What is known for certain is that the two immigrants, both Russian Jews who spoke little English, married in Ottawa on March 12, 1917. Mr. Fonberg’s in-laws, the Dworkins, owned a successful ladies’ clothing store and sold him a Booth Street grocery for $125 — payable in two installments.
Mr. Fonberg’s son, Ralph, now 82, says his father had worked as house painter before happily entering the grocery business in 1917. “Being a businessman and being on your own,” says Ralph, “was a very hopeful ambition of most his friends and contemporaries.”
The grocery business held particular appeal for immigrants. It demanded a strong back and sharp mind, but formal education and “Canadian experience” were not required. English could be learned on the job since most of their customers were newcomers themselves.
Alex Fonberg sought to expand his grocery in keeping with his growing family. His eldest daughter, Lora, was born in October, 1918. She was followed by another girl, Dina, who died as an infant. Ralph arrived in 1922, then Sylvia in 1924.
Friends told him that Somerset Street was a better location for a business. The neighbourhood and its burgeoning population of French-Canadians, Irish and Italian immigrants, was poorly served, they said, and could use a grocery.
In March, 1929 — just months before the stock market crash that would launch the Great Depression — Mr. Fonberg bought the property at 816 Somerset for $4,100.
He opened Fonberg’s Fruit and Grocery Market. The store was filled with barrels and drawers of bulk staples such as sugar, tea, rice, tobacco leaves and molasses. Everything was measured into one- and five-pound bags by Mr. Fonberg, who could usually be found behind the counter in his white apron, shirt and tie.
Fonberg’s featured a glass counter that sold bacon, cheese and, occasionally, kosher salami. More than anything else, though, the store became known for its fruit and vegetables.
Early in the morning, three times a week, Mr. Fonberg would go to the farmer’s market and bring back carefully selected vegetables that he hand-washed and readied for sale. “He was almost obsessed with fresh vegetables: it meant a lot to him,” remembers his son, Ralph.
The Depression brought unusual pressure to bear. Mr. Fonberg was always extending credit to families in need. To cover his expenses, and stay ahead of the bank, Mr. Fonberg and a few other local business owners would write each other cheques to cover their cash shortfalls.
“He kited cheques — that’s the only thing that kept him going during the Depression,” says Ralph.
Mrs. Fonberg also did her part, laundering and sewing sugar sacks made of cotton into bedsheets for her family. Ralph bagged potatoes every weekend. His older sister, Lora, did most of the bookkeeping.
The store was open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week. Mr. Fonberg would hire someone to mind the place during the Jewish high holidays.
Ralph knew his father to take only two vacations. On one, he drove to Philadelphia to visit his sister for a week. The other was during the Second World War when he spent two weeks in Petawawa training for the militia as a member of the Canadian Highlanders.
Still, the Fonbergs considered themselves fortunate. “We managed very nicely,” says Ralph.
The family lived above the store. The place had a large kitchen and a living room that featured a player piano. Lora would often play for her family and friends on Sunday evenings; sometimes they’d dance. When he had spare hours, Mr. Fonberg liked to take his children for a drive in the family Oldsmobile or watch wrestling on TV. Eventually, he was prosperous enough to buy a small cottage near the western end of the streetcar line, in New Orchard Beach, on the Ottawa River.
But Mr. Fonberg suffered heart trouble during the Second World War and began to consider retirement. He asked Ralph if he was interested in taking over the business and offered to build a hardware store on an adjacent lot, a store they could call Fonberg and Son. But Ralph, who was about to take part in the Allied campaign across Europe, said he had other ideas about the direction of his life. (He would go on to a long career in architecture with the Public Works Department.)
Mr. Fonberg sold the building for $13,000 and retired in 1951. He spent winters in Miami Beach, summers at the family cottage, and puttered about his Woodward Avenue bungalow, fixing small appliances. He could walk to the synagogue.
Mr. Fonberg died of a heart attack on May 19, 1976.
“He was a good father, a really considerate guy, always anxious to be sure he was doing everything possible for the family” says Ralph, who now lives at the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre. “When you consider that he was a penniless immigrant who could barely speak English, you have to give top marks for what he did for his family.”
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Siegbert Kaufman didn’t talk to his daughter about his life in Germany. He didn’t explain the scars on his hands and back, or describe his escape from his homeland.
As a girl, Sandra Kaufman knew only that something terrible had happened to her father. Nightmares would send him racing through the house.
She would eventually hear the story from her mother, Hannah, who had married Siegbert in 1944, the year after he arrived in Ottawa.
Hannah Kaufman told Sandra that her name was, in fact, Kauffmann. (Siegbert had changed the name to something less German-sounding when he arrived in Canada.) The family had lived in Fulda, a town in central Germany, northeast of Frankfurt. Her grandfather, Henry, had been a store owner.
Mrs. Kaufman didn’t have all the details. What she told Sandra was this: her grandparents committed suicide during the war rather than die at the hands of the Nazis. Siegbert endured many horrors, but escaped the country with the help of the German underground.
Sandra was never told how her father’s hands and back were scarred — she thought the marks looked like strips from a lash — but she now believes it happened in the Dachau concentration camp. An immigration document unearthed among her father’s papers (while she was searching for photos to accompany this story) listed his last place of residence as, “Dachau, 1936-39.”
Dachau was established by the Nazis in 1933 on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory. It was initially used to hold political opponents of the regime, but gradually came to hold more Jewish prisoners.
Sandra knows nothing about his years in Dachau, only that he escaped with the help of men who had served in the First World War with her grandfather. The German underground arranged for a boat to take him out of the country, and then to England.
“He never talked about it. He left it to my mother to tell me,” remembers Sandra. “It was a bad past.”
In Ottawa, Siegbert Kaufman went to work at a local deli whose owner had sponsored his emigration to Canada. There, he fell in love with a customer, Hannah Rose, a 24-year-old Ottawa woman whose brother was a local rabbi. (He opposed their marriage, leading to a long estrangement between the siblings.)
Siegbert and Hannah Kaufman built a nest egg for a business of their own. They used that money in 1951 to buy 816 Somerset one year after Sandra was born. The store was renamed Kaufman’s Grocery and it soon earned a reputation for its fine cuts of beef.
Mr. Kaufman served as his own butcher and would later expand the store to make room for a bigger meat department. “His meats carried the store,” says Sandra.
In the 1950s, the neighbourhood was a cosmopolitan mix of German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Chinese immigrants. Mr. Kaufman was quick with languages and would try to speak to his customers in their mother tongue. He was as garrulous as his wife, Hannah, was quiet. “He had a smile on his face forever. He loved doing what he did,” says Sandra.
Mr. Kaufman also loved to cook and raise birds. He had a weakness for greasy food, and the butter cream pies and cakes that he had known as a boy in Germany. He grew to be seriously overweight.
Spare hours were spent with his budgies. He kept more than 200 birds in a basement aviary, then built another in his backyard using an old walk-in freezer.
Most of his time, though, was consumed by the store. He rose early each morning to buy fruit at the market, loading everything into the back of his Chevy Bel-Air station wagon. For years, he would close the store only on Jewish holidays.
In the late 1950s, the family family bought a cottage in Luskville, Que. and Mr. Kaufman would take Sundays at the lake. It was the only vacation he ever knew.
On Feb. 25, 1963, while cleaning out the meat counter, Mr. Kaufman collapsed in his grocery store. Then 12-years-old, Sandra was called to the office of Glashan Public School. “I was told to go home A.S.A.P.,” she says.
Sandra ran home. A Schneiders’ sales representative drove her to the hospital, but her father was already dead. He was 43.
“He was a super kind man: he was generous and would give anyone credit,” says Sandra. “He was a devoted husband and a loving father. I really miss him, I was daddy’s girl.”
Hannah Kaufman operated the store with her daughter for six more years. They sold it not long after a night-time break-in, when some burglars stole cigarettes and cash as Mrs. Kaufman and Sandra listened from their beds.
The family moved to Sandy Hill and Mrs. Kaufman went to work at the Rideau Bakery. She died of heart failure at the age of 51. Says Sandra: “They were workaholics both of them. They never took it easy.
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Pierino Pucci stood on the corner of Gladstone and Bronson, waiting for a green light. The father of nine was on his way to the drug store to buy some medicine for his youngest son, Perry.
The signal changed and Mr. Pucci stepped onto the street just as a car turned right. The back injuries he sustained required two surgeries, ending his career as a construction foreman — and launching his life as a businessman.
Mr. Pucci won $20,000 from an insurance settlement, and he used the money open a small, Italian grocery on Bell Street. It was the realization of a lifelong dream. “He was so proud of that little store,” says his daughter, Giovanna.
Mr. Pucci relished the thought of being his own boss after years of taking orders from other men. His store also held the promise of forever lifting him out of the poverty that had marked his life from the time of his childhood in Italy.
Mr. Pucci was born on June 9, 1928 near the town of Savuto, in the hills of Calabria. He was the first son in a family of five daughters. The Puccis lived in a two-storey house — farm animals occupied the ground floor — half an hour from the nearest source of drinking water. The family ate what they could harvest themselves.
Southern Italy at the time was in the throes of an exodus: towns emptied as residents fanned out to Europe, North America and Australia in search of jobs. Mr. Pucci’s father, Vincent, spent years in Canada and the United States, pounding railroad tracks into the earth and sending his wages home. His son Pierino , and later, Rico, the youngest of seven, would follow him.
Mr. Pucci was 24-years-old when he arrived in Canada in the winter of 1952. His uncle, who owned a lumber mill in Kelowna, B.C., sponsored his emigration and gave him a job as a lumberjack.
He saved enough money in two years to send for his wife, Carmela, whom he married when they were both teenagers, and their four young children: Teresa, Vincent, Pat, and Giovanna. It took eight days for the family to cross the ocean in the passenger ship, Volcania. They disembarked at Pier 21 in Halifax, where almost a million immigrants would first set foot in Canada, and began a long rail journey to British Columbia. In letters, Mr. Pucci had described Canada as “the land of opportunity.” From a train car in the middle of February, however, the country looked more like a wasteland.
In Kelowna, Mr. Pucci disappeared into the forests for weeks at a time, leaving his ever-expanding family — it quickly grew to include Rico, Peter and Perry — in a rough-hewn home without indoor toilets or running water.
The Puccis spent seven years roughing it in the B.C. Interior and were happy to leave it behind in 1961 when they joined Carmela’s only sister in Ottawa. The city was booming. Mr. Pucci worked as a pipe layer and blaster, building water and sewer lines toward homes that mushroomed in Beacon Hill, Kanata, and Orleans.
Daughters Anna and Gina were born, and Mrs. Pucci, a soft touch compared to her strict husband, stayed at home to care for what were now nine children. She baked bread three times a week.
Mr. Pucci proved to be a savvy businessman. His first store, Bell Street Confectionary, was expropriated by a school in 1969 so he found a partner and bought 816 Somerset St. for $30,000. It was a larger, well-established grocery with an upstairs apartment that could earn rent.
Somerset Street was then home to thousands of post-war European immigrants who gave Pucci and Ruperto Groceries and Meats a ready clientele. The two men hired a butcher to carve pork chops and Italian sausage. They sold capicolla, prosciutto, and other cold cuts, along with dried pasta, olive oils, and Parmesan cheese.
In 1971, when his partner quit and returned to Toronto, Mr. Pucci decided to again reinvent the business. He found a new partner and converted the store to the Italian-Canadian Coffee Shop and Pool Room. For years, 816 Somerset was a gathering place for Italian men. Friends would drink espresso, argue about soccer, and play cards. Mr. Pucci and his partner would split the shifts, one opening the shop at 9 a.m. and the other closing late, whenever the last customer ambled out the door.
The coffee shop was a success, but money remained tight. The four eldest Pucci children all took jobs to help support the family after graduating from high school. There wasn’t enough money for higher education.
“It bothered him a lot,” recalls his eldest child, Teresa. “I think that bothered him to the end.”
Mr. Pucci closed the cafe for the last time in 1985 and retired with Carmela to their comfortable home in Carleton Heights. He died two years ago, at the age of 75. He is survived by his wife, their nine children, 24 grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.
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Each day before the sun rose, Sophal Hardy would climb into his Ford F-100 pick-up truck and drive to the Provincial Fruit Company’s cash-and-carry warehouse on Colonnade Road.
He wanted the choicest produce for the customers of his fledgling business, the Mekong Grocery, so he was always sure to arrive by 6 a.m.
A refugee from war-torn Cambodia, Mr. Hardy had named the Somerset Street grocery for the waterway that forms the lifeblood of Southeast Asia. The Mekong River stretches 4,200-kilometres through China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Many millions depend on it for their livelihoods and well-being.
“Everyone from that part of the world knows that river,” says Mr. Hardy. “That is why we called our store Mekong.”
The Mekong Grocery opened its doors in August, 1985, stocked with what was then exotic fare in Ottawa: Coconut milk, kaffir lime leaves, hot chilies, galangal, turmeric, lemon grass, tamarind, fish sauces and pastes. It sold jackfruit and rambutans, mud fish, catfish and silver fish.
For Mr. Hardy and his wife, Khorany Ou, the store was a brave wager, a white-knuckled gamble on success. All of their collected wealth had been poured into the Mekong, along with as much money as they could borrow.
The business could not fail. Not after all they had been through.
Sophal Hardy was a 16-year-old student, living with his aunt in Phnom Penh, when the Khmer Rouge seized control of the capital and overthrew the U.S.-backed government. Desperate to escape and unable to find his parents, Sophal joined a ragged band of students who walked west for 400 kilometres to the Thai border. It took him more than a month to reach sanctuary.
He spent months in a refugee camp, then another two years as a student in France, where he learned that his parents had died in the violence that seized Cambodia. He was eventually sponsored to emigrate to Canada (and later adopted) by Dr. Richard Hardy, a University of Ottawa theology professor who had learned of his story through an acquaintance working in Thailand.
Sophal arrived in Canada in 1978 and enrolled at Ottawa’s De La Salle High School, then studied business administration at the University of Ottawa.
He went to work for Metropolitan Life, an insurance firm, but the desire to operate his own business remained. His wife, Khorany, was also keen to launch a business since she couldn’t find work in Ottawa. (Khorany came to Canada in 1980 from Cambodia, but she does not like to talk about her experience.) The couple had been introduced by a mutual friend and were married on Oct. 16, 1982, but they didn’t want to start a family until they had achieved some measure of success.
Ottawa at the time was changing rapidly. Project 4000, an ambitious plan spearheaded by Mayor Marion Dewar, brought 4,000 refugees to the city from war-torn Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. They remade the face of the city while greatly expanding the population of what had become Chinatown.
Sophal and Khorany eventually realized that the city’s newcomers offered them the business opportunity they had long sought. Few stores offered for sale the regional spices and wares of the Mekong River basin. They walked through Chinatown and decided to take advantage of the ‘For Rent’ sign at 816 Somerset St.
Mr. Hardy hedged his bets when the Mekong opened. He didn’t quit his insurance job, but would help his wife buy, wash and stack vegetables early each morning before going to the office. He’d return to the grocery when everyone else in his office went home.
The store remained open seven days a week, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. After its doors closed, Sophal and Khorany would climb back into their pick-up truck and deliver rice and other groceries to families in outlying apartment buildings. They would finally return to their apartment most nights around 11 p.m.
“There were no holidays, nothing” says Mr. Hardy. “Our life was work. We worked so hard.”
They never considered giving up. “I was always thinking, ‘We have to be successful. One day I am going to work less and enjoy life,’” says Khorany. “That’s what I’m thinking. In my mind, that is success. Relaxing a little bit, enjoying life.”
The store steadily gained a reputation among the immigrant community for its fair prices and dedicated service. After their first child, Sophie, was born in 1987, Mr. Hardy felt secure enough to quit his insurance job. A son, Richard, followed two years later. By the early 1990s, the family could afford to hire an employee.
They sold the Mekong in 1995 to another Cambodian family after buying a much larger store on Bank Street, the Grace Ottawa. They now work hours they consider reasonable and devote more time to their children, both students at Immaculata High School.
“Now it’s getting a little bit easier than before because we have some time for rest,” says Mr. Hardy, 46. “Me, I go play soccer a lot and my son, Richard, plays sports. We have time to enjoy things a little more.”
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The Mekong Grocery today sits blackened and empty, its windows covered with plywood. A rusty mailbox next to the front door dangles by a single screw.
After more than a century of life and commerce, the building waits for the wrecking ball.
Makara Thach has not been able to bring himself to look at the store. It would be, he says, an unbearable reminder of what he has lost.
Friends have encouraged him to open a new store, and while he would like to resume his grocery business, the idea now seems overwhelming. “Saying is easy and doing is harder,” he says.
His first priority is to pay off debt. There is a $22,000 hospital bill, and money owed to his suppliers and to relatives who gave him a down payment for the Mekong.
The only possessions that survived the fire were two bags of clothes, and remarkably, a photo album. Mr. Thach unpacked those things earlier this month when he moved into a tidy apartment, donated rent free for a year, at the corner of Somerset and Kent. The place has hardwood floors and a sunny back porch; it came with new beds, a baby stroller and other furnishings collected by local businesses. His grandson, Sipheng, and son-in-law, Mr. Svay, live with him.
This is not the first time Mr. Thach has been forced to rebuild his life. He has survived Cambodia’s wars, its killing fields and its prison system. He has been a refugee in Thailand and a newcomer mystified by snow on
the streets of Montreal. And while none of his earlier hardships can compare to the agony that he now suffers, he vows to persevere.
“We will try our best,” he says. “We will make it somehow.”
An Address in Time: 816 Somerset Street
1897 Lumberman Matthew Cochrane is the first to develop the property, building a home on the lot designated as 816 Somerset St. Mr. Cochrane was a “piler,” someone who specialized in piling lumber so that it would dry without warping.
April 26, 1900 The Great Fire, which began in Hull and spread across the river to Ottawa’s lumber yards, sweeps through the city’s industrial core, then moves to the densely-packed residential neighbourhoods nearby. The wooden houses around Somerset Street, then known as Rochesterville, fuel the inferno. The home at 816 Somerset is destroyed, but Mr. Cochrane escapes with his life.
1901 Mr. Cochrane rebuilds with the help of a $750 grant from the relief fund created by the city. The city directory describes lots next to the building simply as “fireswept.” In keeping with new bylaws, the building is made of brick. Mr. Cochrane remains in the house until 1910.
1913 The building begins its life of commerce when a grocery store opens, Major & Hurteau. George L. Major, one of the store’s principals, lives there until at least 1921, then continues to rent out the property.
1925 The store changes hands several times during the next four years and is once listed as a tobacco shop operated by Alex Terrade.
1929 In March, the property is sold by Mr. Major to Alex Fonberg for $4,100. Mr. Fonberg, a Russian immigrant, opens a grocery and lives upstairs with his wife, Ida, and their children. They operate Fonberg’s for 22 years.
1951 The store is sold to Siegbert and Hannah Kaufman, and renamed Kaufman’s Grocery. Mr. Kaufman, who escaped Germany just before the outbreak of the Second World War, suffers a fatal heart attack in the store in September,
1963 Mrs. Kaufman continues to operate the grocery, with her only daughter, Sandra, until 1969.
1969 In December, Mrs. Kaufman sells the property for $30,000 to Pierino Pucci and Frank Ruperto, Italian immigrants who open Pucci and Ruperto Groceries and Meats. But the partnership ends when Mr. Ruperto returns to Toronto.
1971 Mr. Pucci takes a new partner and converts the store to the Italian-Canadian Coffee Shop and Pool Room. The coffee shop becomes a popular hangout for Italian men.
1982 The property is purchased by Ottawa landlord Hin Gee Tom for $95,000. Again, a number of short-term tenants take over the building, including an unsuccessful doughnut shop in 1984.
1985 In August, Cambodian refugees Sophal Hardy and Khorany Ou rent the store and open the Mekong Grocery. The store is one of the first in Ottawa to offer spices and fish from Southeast Asia.
1995 The Mekong Grocery is sold by Mr. Hardy to another Cambodian who continues to operate the store under the same name.
2001 Cambodian refugee Makara Thach and his wife, Coli Yan, buy the Mekong Grocery, then move into the apartment above the store with their four children. The Thach’s eldest daughter, Linny, gives birth to their first grandchild, Sipheng, in 2004. Her Cambodian husband, Bunny Svay, joins the family a year later.
April 5, 2005 An early morning fire claims the lives of five Thach family members: Coli Yan, and her children Linny, 23, Gary, 14, Danny, 13, and Sunny, 12. Makara Thach rescues his year-old grandson then plunges back into the burning building. He survives with his grandson, Sipheng, and his son-in-law, Mr. Svay.
*The timeline and history were developed through land registry documents, city directories, city archival documents and interviews with former residents and descendants of those who lived and worked at 816 Somerset.
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