One good corner grocery store and an anchor for generations

Vogue Market

• Cadieux Road

Address: 9200 Cadieux Road

History: The Misuraca family built their own American dream at a small eastside corner grocery that opened in 1946

Show and tell: What building in Detroit has special significance to you and why? Email sarah@outliermedia.org with your favorite, and we’ll dig into its history

At the narrow corner of Cadieux Road and Lanark Street on Detroit’s far eastside, an unremarkable, red brick building presents itself to the world like a diamond. To reinforce the point, there is a motif of rose-colored diamonds in a row on a cream-colored panel on the exterior wall.

Vogue Super Market is a liquor store now, but it was first a neighborhood grocery that opened in 1946 and was built by the Misuraca family.

Nina Misuraca Ignaczak shared a photo on social media weeks ago of a tattered and yellowed newspaper clipping that had been saved for decades. The article marked the opening of the market, with a black-and-white photograph of three men standing in front of aisles full of canned food. They are wearing white shirts, white aprons and big smiles. One man was her great-grandfather, one was her grandfather and the other was her great-uncle.

Misuraca Ignaczak is the founder and editor of Planet Detroit, a nonprofit newsroom (and Outlier Media partner) focusing on environmental justice and public health. Her great-grandparents were grocers. Her great-grandfather Gataeno Misuraca left the depressed town of Terrassini in Sicily, Italy in 1913. He immigrated to Detroit to look for economic opportunity, going through the once-famous immigration station on Ellis Island and then changing his name to Thomas. Records show he had $60 with him when he arrived, about $1,900 today. The store on Cadieux allowed Nina’s family to realize an always improbable, but now even more distant American Dream .

Vogue Super Market was the family’s second grocery store. Their first was in a smaller space at East Canfield and Lenox. The family lived in an apartment above the first store while they ran it. The Cadieux store was a step up. Thomas ran the store with his brother, and they supported two families and eight children between them, along with their sister. When Thomas died in 1964, he left the store to his brother and sister and to his own children including Nina’s grandfather, Lawrence Misuraca, who then supported his own family through the store.

“That’s how they supported four kids,” she said of her grandparents. “It helped pay for law school for my dad.”

Not long before the Misuracas built the grocery store, the land had been empty and undeveloped . Nina called her great-grandparents’ store a part of Detroit’s suburban sprawl of the mid-20th century.

The present-day liquor store is still well cared for. But it would take a long conversation with Nina or a flight of imagination to appreciate Vogue Market as an extended family’s anchor and a touchstone for its neighborhood. It’s a camouflage under layers of history typical of countless buildings in Detroit. Their significance is difficult, if not impossible, to see from the street, but that doesn’t mean those buildings aren’t cherished. That is as true of the market while the Misuracas owned it as it is for the current owners.

“It’s one of many buildings that my family touched,” Nina said. “They had a hand in founding the Holy Family church . That is still there.”

Vogue had its own meat counter, and the Italian sausage, flavored with fennel seeds, was particularly famous partly because it was used to supply the press box at Tigers games.

“I do remember going into the depths of the stadium to deliver the sausage,” Nina said, recalling a morning delivery with her dad. The sausage recipe is preserved in a family cookbook.

Nina’s grandparents ran the store until 1989 when they sold it. She isn’t as nostalgic about the past as she is appreciative of it. “I think a lot about unskilled people like my great grandparents who were able to come here and able to succeed,” she said. “We don’t really have an infrastructure to support immigrants in that way now.”

As for her family’s legacy at Vogue, “I’m just old enough to be able to have experienced that,” she said. “Every neighborhood had a corner grocery store.”

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