The De Fatta Grocery Store in Shreveport

A photo from Shreveport History (shreveporthistory.com) piqued my insatiable need to conduct location research, which then sparked my sadness about Shreveport's lost history.

Or, how the Interstate obliterated a vintage Shreveport scene of the De Fatta grocery store, shot gun shacks, and hot tamale vendors.

I love the website, Shreveporthistory.com, because it's chock-full of photos of buildings and places that no longer exist. And, while digging around there again on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I found yet another gem: the De Fatta Grocery and Market along a stretch of shotgun houses and tamale vendors somewhere in Shreveport, Caddo Parish, Louisiana.

But where, exactly, was this place? The website where I found this photo has a great collection but not much information. I began looking at the photograph for location and dating clues. There's a street sign, but it's too blurry to read; a couple of tamale vendors; a service station that appears to stand just across the street from the store; and, in the background, a large building that indicates downtown was just up the road. The cars look like they're from the 1950s.

So off to city directories I go!

A 1940 directory listing for DeFatta (De Fatta, or Defatta) indicates that there were a sizeable number of people with the same name who owned grocery stores, leading me to believe that they're related.

In the 1940 directory for the city of Shreveport, I found a slew of De Fattas who owned or worked in grocery stores, but the locations were not as apparent. There was a store at 1648 Logan, one at 1453 Jordan; another at 314 E Stoner. Other grocery stores were marked in the directory but not separately. And, when looking at their street-based listings, the clues on the photos were not aligning with the information in the city directory: the Stoner Avenue grocery store was next to a fish market; the Jordan Avenue store was not near a service station; and the Logan Avenue location was not at an intersection.

And then, I used Google maps to find these addresses in today's world. None of the locations still exist anymore -- the Jordan Street location was destroyed for Interstate 20; the Stoner Avenue location, near the Red River, is also gone; and the Logan Avenue location is now in a neighborhood full of empty lots. However, the hills that appear on the photograph are also apparent on Logan Avenue, so I was thinking... maybe this is Logan Avenue?

But then I sought out some old newspapers.

The 1940 city directory's listing for DeFatta grocery store on Stoner Avenue lists a fish market as a neighbor, which is not shown on the photograph.

In 1940, the DeFatta grocery store on Jordan Street was not near a service station or a tamale shop.

The 1940 city directory listing for Logan Street shows the location for Defatta's Grocery, but it's not at an intersection and Snookie's Beauty Shop is its closest commercial neighbor. However, the landscape around Logan Street looked very similar to the landscape in the photo.

In an advertisements selling hams and margarine, I found listings for all grocery stores that carried these items. Using these listings, I easily applied their addresses to Google Maps and cross-referenced the street listings in the back of the 1940 directory listing to engage in some more vicarious sight-seeing. And that 's when I found J.M DeFatta's Grocery Store's listing at 1000 Louisiana Avenue.

The City Directory from 1940 cut the listing into two separate pages, so I checked the 1950 City Directory. And what do you know? I found that the DeFatta Grocery and Market, at the intersection of Louisiana Avenue and Howell Street, was next to Jay's Service Station (in the 1940, it was Robert Carlton's station). And, next door to DeFatta's Grocery and Market was Frank Garza's hot tamales, and just a few doors down, Anguiano Marcial was selling hot tamales, too!

An advertisement that was shilling for ham led me to another listing of DeFatta's grocery stores in the Shreveport Times from September 1941.

The 1950 City Directory for Shreveport lists DeFatta's Grocery and Market along Louisiana Avenue - with all the correct context clues: tamale stores, a service station, and an intersection!

While I believed I found the actual location, I wanted to make sure: after all, I've been wrong before. I went back to Google Maps and typed in "1000 Louisiana Avenue, Shreveport." And guess what??? It's now Interstate 20. As is the Jordan Street location, as is the Texas Avenue location.

GAWD I hate that damned road.

I was able to ascertain that the tall building looming in the background of the photograph is the Fairmont Apartment Building on Cotton Street, which solidified my location discovery: this photograph of the De Fatta Grocery and Market was taken while looking northward on Louisiana Avenue between Howell and Line streets.

It's a vintage Shreveport scene -- a grocery store founded by Italian immigrants, shot gun houses closely lining the road, and Mexican immigrants selling tamales. And it's also a vintage Shreveport tragedy that all of this uniqueness was wiped away by that bloody interstate.