Then & Now: Land & Sea Foods, Pleasant Street, Worcester
A fish store. A bakery. A bar. An auto dealership.
A block of small, independent businesses on Pleasant Street, between Sever and Fruit streets, was toppled in the late 1960s, part of the Elm Park Urban Renewal Project.
In place of the razed buildings came the Pleasant Tower Apartments, a $2.5 million solution to Worcester's shortage of housing for the elderly. It was the latest project of the Worcester Housing Authority.
One of the displaced businesses was Land & Sea Foods, run for decades by Marcel Chene. He opened the business in 1933, after working in the Bancroft Hotel and then, with the Depression forcing him to hustle for income, selling fish on the streets of Worcester.
Years earlier, Chene moved from France to chase the American dream, he once told a reporter.
The store had four locations, including the corner of Sever and Pleasant streets — shown in this week's Then photo, from 1967. With the housing authority taking over the block, Chen moved a block to the east, to the Whittier Building at Fruit and Pleasant streets.
By then, the store was focusing on fish, its longtime standing as a corner market proving to be no match for the many grocery stores in the city. The core product kept the business afloat. "Competitors couldn't fight me in fish," Chene told a reporter years after his son Alfred took over the business.
Other stores on the block displaced by urban renewal were Aaron Heitin Lincoln-Mercury, Bowler's Cafe and a small bakery.
After years of planning, followed by the acquisition of several properties, the Worcester Housing Authority unveiled the 141-unit Pleasant Tower Apartments in early 1971.
Meantime, Marcel Chene, who held tightly to his strong French accent, retired to Charlton, where he had built a house. In his later years, he sold peat moss culled from his 100-acre lot and tended to his thousands of tomato plants.
"I'm glad I came to America where I could make my own dream come true," he told a reporter in 1976.
Last week Then & Now: 47 Harvard St., Worcester
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Then & Now: Land & Sea Foods, Pleasant Street, Worcester
