Farewell to a jewel of Manayunk

The armed bandit bound Victor Ostroff's hands and feet with plastic zip ties, did the same to Ostroff's assistant, and ordered the pair to lie on their stomachs in the back room. He took the videotape from the security camera, crippling the screen showing the sales floor.

"We're here for a robbery. Don't make us do anything - we're here for a robbery."

 It was 10:50 on a weekday morning in late March, and Ostroff, 57, was a hostage in his small store. For 112 years, A.I. Poland Jewelers had occupied this spot on Main Street in Manayunk, and the four-generation family business had never said uncle.

Factories that made Manayunk a potent mill town on the Schuylkill had come and gone. Poland's stayed put.

Main Street shops from that industrial heyday had departed. Poland's stayed put.

The fortunes of generations of self-described "Yunkers" - the denizens of a big rock known as "the hill" - had risen, fallen, and risen again. Poland's stayed put.

But on March 29, as two men with a loaded semiautomatic weapon put on rubber gloves and headed for the loot, staying put was not what Vic Ostroff had in mind.

"I'm so close to retirement," he thought as he lay on the floor. His going-out-of-business sale was just five weeks away.

"It's hard to believe that this is happening now."

Tall and lean, Ostroff was a fast talker, a fast mover, even as a kid running down the hill's zigzag streets after school. His sweet spot was hustling behind the counter or fixing a necklace, not kicking back and watching the clock. He wriggled and squirmed as his two captors ransacked the store.

The robbers were rifling through century-old wood-and-glass showcases that made Manayunk's only remaining industrial-era shop feel like a Smithsonian exhibit. A democratic display of baubles - gold charms, $40 crystal bowls, diamond pendants - honored the store's ethos of selling to the working class, even after the affluent had turned Main Street into a bon-vivant strip.

The two men were scooping up $100,000 of his jewels. Ostroff craned his neck to see what he could in a mirror.

Maybe he could slip out of his cuffs? Find some scissors? He scavenged and scraped and wasn't very quiet about it. Then . . .

Thwack!

The butt of the 9mm semiautomatic handgun struck the back of Ostroff's skull, and he began to bleed.

In 1953, when Sam and Zelda Ostroff brought their infant son home to their apartment above the family store, Manayunk was a bleaker place - nothing like it was in 1899, when Abraham Poland set up shop at 4347 Main.

Uncle Abe had moved his street trade into a store embodying location, location, location. Main Street drew lots of customers because it had lots of textile and paper mills, which sent lots of workers home with cash.

Originally a town called Flat Rock, this place had been steaming forward since 1819, when a two-mile canal was carved along the riverbank, part of a waterway stretching all the way to the coal region near Pottsville, Pa., that would produce power for the mills that followed.

The river inspired a rechristening to Manayunk, believed to be an American Indian derivation of "place by the running waters." (Philadelphia absorbed Manayunk in 1854.)

The hill rising above the Schuylkill would become studded with churches and homes facing the setting sun, drawing immigrant workers and comparisons to the south of France.

But by the 1950s, Manayunk's canal had been abandoned, its factories wiped out, and the local bank emptied by the Great Depression. There were so few Main Street merchants, you could count them on one hand.

"I think Manayunk is going down a whole lot," G.F. Proctor, a dentist with a home and practice a block away from Poland's, complained in a 1951 newspaper story. "Many homes need repairing and painting up."

The police, too, defected to leafier, newer Roxborough.

"Used to be we'd have a foot patrolman or two walking along the downtown area here," hardware-store owner Bernard Maurer, at nearby Main and Grape Streets, lamented in that same article. "Now all we have is a squad car coming through from time to time. And you know how easy it is for a wrongdoer to hide in a doorway until a car gets by."

Ostroff's father, Sam, had gone to work at Poland's after returning from World War II and marrying Zelda Lipshutz, the daughter of Poland's proprietor, Barnett Lipshutz. He had run the family store for years and welcomed his son-in-law's help. But just two weeks after Victor was born, the patriarch died.

The next year, two warehouse fires broke out in one month on Venice Island, the strip of land across the canal, where factories once roared. It was hardly a surprise that one of the incinerated carcasses was a vacant building.

In 1955, Aunt Fannie Poland, Uncle Abe's widow, died, unleashing a three-year inheritance squabble for the store among extended family members. When it ended, the shop was Sam and Zelda's.

Running the store was a high-wire act. No time for baseball games or leisurely vacations with their son and daughter. At 13, Victor was enlisted to help collect payments from customers at their homes on Saturdays.

Sam and Zelda wanted better for their boy. So in 1975, with an accounting degree from Pennsylvania State University, he left town.

The young man's job as a watch salesman vanished twice in two years as his company downsized. Soured on big business, he married his college sweetheart, Jan, a Port Richmond girl, and returned to Philadelphia, joining his folks at Poland's.

"You're just a kid, and you don't know what you're talking about," they would scold if he offered a new idea about how to run the place.

"I think I have new ideas, and you don't know what you're talking about," he'd snipe back.

With no buzzer on the front door, a customer would waltz in, and the heated argument would end. When the customer left, the showroom-floor hash-out resumed.

"This," Ostroff would recall with fondness, "is family business. That's the part no one ever sees."

Sam Ostroff fell ill with cancer. His son assumed more control just as artists and antiques peddlers, moved by the poetry and promise of its ravaged real estate, began to transform Manayunk.

Funky shops, vintage-clothing boutiques, restaurants, and bars opened. In 1984, the CoreStates pro bicycling race turned "The Wall" into an internationally known cycling-circuit stop.

"When my parents bought their building, their friends thought they were crazy for buying in Manayunk," said Jane Lipton, whose Lower Merion family opened an antiques shop in 1986.

As it went upscale, Main Street became the envy of downtrodden urban strips across the country. Even national retail chains were signing high-priced leases there.

But Poland's didn't change any of its vintage touches.

"In this day and age, when things are very corporate and impersonal, this is just about as personal as it gets," Jan Ostroff said of her husband's store. "Where something that has been established by his family, and a legacy that's been left to him by his family, that with all the working side by side with his parents, and just the connection that all of us have, I think it's really honorable work."

Ostroff's father died in 1991, his mother in 2005. Expatriate Manayunkers loved coming back to find the shop exactly as they remembered.

"We got a Holy Communion ring," Yunkers who hadn't been there in 40 years would announce. Or, "My mother shopped here."

Also unchanged: the front door, unlocked all day.

Jan Ostroff worried about her husband's safety. In October, robbers killed a jeweler at his family store in Northeast Philadelphia.

"Being in the jewelry business," she said, "it's something that's never far from our minds. You dread it."

She put it out of her mind. "You say, 'Well, maybe we'll be lucky.' "

The door shut behind the robbers. Ostroff's assistant freed herself and called 911.

In a getaway car heading down Main Street, court documents say, sat two men who had grown up on the same city block and later shared a state prison cell: Raheem Hankerson and Anthony Burnett. They were on parole.

Their Honda reached a fork in the road, where they were startled to see a 17-passenger police van, manned by a chief on traffic detail. The three men exchanged glances.

"They got spooked," said Lt. George McClay, whose detectives worked the case.

Hankerson, behind the wheel, sped up the hill above Main. The police van couldn't pull a U-turn fast enough, and the Honda slipped into the labyrinth of steep inclines, dead-end streets, and shoulder-to-shoulder houses that is Manayunk.

Speeding onto a dead-end street, the pair ditched the car in a parking spot and disappeared on foot down an alley. Neighbors called 911.

Police towed and searched the Honda, finding $100,000 in valuables tagged with the words A.I. Poland Jewelers, a security-camera videotape, plastic ties, rubber gloves, and a bag with black wigs. The video showed a man in a wig being waited on by Ostroff's assistant, then pulling out a gun and forcing her into the back room.

Police also found a loaded 9mm handgun and a revolver Ostroff had kept hidden at Poland's. And in the glove compartment, investigative pay dirt: a wallet with Hankerson's ID.

Six days later, with help from the FBI, Hankerson, 30, was taken into custody. Three weeks later, Burnett, 44, was arrested after police shot him in North Philadelphia.

On May 12, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia returned indictments against the pair. Both men remain in federal custody, awaiting a trial date.

"It has been pretty crazy since we started," a breathless Ostroff said in May, three days into Poland's farewell sale. His head wound, patched with seven surgical staples, had healed.

With Mother's Day coming, customers flowed in that Thursday afternoon, as Ostroff was more or less flying solo. For the moment, he had just one customer, Stephen Spinelli Jr., president of Philadelphia University.

Out of nowhere, a deluge of others starting showing up, until eight were crammed inside. Ostroff eyed the door for each before clicking a remote control on his hip that unlatched a security lock installed after the robbery.

Days like these were partly why Ostroff was retiring. With no children and able to afford only one full-time worker, he had been playing with fire since his parents died. A little bad luck with his health could have sunk the business overnight.

Soaring gold prices were another reason. For several years, commodities traders had been buying up gold, as happens in a turbulent economy, driving up its price. That made new inventory expensive for jewelers, even more expensive for hard-pressed shoppers, hurting sales.

Poland's hung on by doing repairs and buying old gold from customers and selling it to refiners, who melted it down and held on to the purified metal as an investment. A plastic bag atop a display case held several charms and a gold chain, with a handwritten card: "This much gold is worth $500 today."

"I'll be with you in a minute," Ostroff said as a man in work boots, his jeans stained with fresh dirt, took a place in line next to the sharply dressed university president.

Jan Ostroff boxed up a pendant, and her husband rang up the sale before Spinelli went on his way.

"I've probably bought three or four items here throughout the years," Spinelli said, pleased to have made off with an unexpected discount. Of Vic Ostroff, he said: "He's very attentive."

Poland's was now, in its final days and with steep markdowns, enjoying the kind of business hard to come by on Main Street in recent years. Center City's renaissance took a bite out of Manayunk's. So did the recession.

In 2007, said Lipton, the local business association's president, she could drive down Main Street and count 30 or more vacancies. "It was scary," she said, adding that things had improved as landlords had dropped rents.

Poland's, meanwhile, did not so much as try a Web page or a Facebook account to draw customers. Its direct-mail marketing and reputation were deemed enough.

"I've been coming here since I was 14," said Destry Kiker, 46, sweaty and in dirt-specked garb. "I've never lived more than 2,000 yards from where I was born."

What kind of job did he have? "Grave digger. Just came from work," he said. "I'm sorry about that."

Kiker worried that his occupation might be off-putting to a stranger. Maybe because so many Manayunk newcomers were more art house than blue collar like him.

Ostroff approached Kiker's end of the counter. The grave digger removed a baseball cap. "You said, 'Destry'?" the merchant asked.

Yes. Their fathers had known of each other. Kiker's family had been Yunkers since the 19th century, too.

"I knew it," Ostroff said, and they shook hands.

Kiker ordered a mother's ring for his wife for their anniversary. But he was at Poland's for another reason, too.

"I was, like, there's a piece of Main Street disappearing," he told Ostroff, "and I want to be a part of it."

Ostroff smiled wide. He'd been hearing that a lot as Poland's July 4 curtain call approached. It broke his heart a little, but soothed his soul.

Each reminiscence, every exchange with an old customer, made the robbery less important - and the memories of a century more enduring.

To watch a video about Victor Ostroff and A.I. Poland Jewelers, go to www.philly.com/AIPoland

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