Gobbled up by changing times

After 37 years, South End sandwich shop shuts its doors

George George (left) and Wayne Joslin, former South End street kids turned sandwich shop owners, are moving on. (George Rizer/Globe Staff)

By the time lunch rolled around yesterday, the front door to Albany Sandwich Shop was flung wide open to the street and warm bodies in heavy coats jostled for space inside.

There were no seats or tables to be had. No eggs, steak, or sausage, either. Forget about that greasy western omelet sandwich. Supplies were running low. But no one cared.

This was it.

After 37 years of serving breakfast and lunch on the corner of Albany and Union Park streets in the South End, longtime friends and business partners George George and Wayne Joslin were cooking up their last meals for friends and loved ones.

Their plucky little diner, where the food was always inexpensive and fast, had outlived its customer base. Gone are the laborers, scrap metal yard workers, and auto mechanics who once waited in lines down the street for a hot ham and egg sandwich.

Today's South End residents, by and large, are decidedly more genteel. Their tastes run more toward sashimi than pastrami. And so, George and Joslin, former South End street kids turned graying grandfathers, decided to move on. But one last time yesterday, the old-school crowd gathered for the old-guard owners.

The masons and the meter maids, the elevator mechanics and construction workers - they were all there. And the owners greeted them with a smile as they walked through the door.

"Hey, grandsons!" Joslin hollered.

"Joanne!"

"Marty Sullivan!"

"You think I wasn't coming?" Sullivan replied.

Just as George and Joslin had been counting down to this day, so had their customers, including a few who have been eating at Albany Sandwich Shop for decades.

It is an institution that predates even George and Joslin working there, having opened originally under different owners in the early 1960s. George, the son of a cabdriver and a shoe factory worker, had a job there as a cook. He worked the griddle in a cramped kitchen in the back and dared to dream of little more than that.

"Where we came from, we had no dreams," George said. "It was about survival. Dreams were for educated people, affluent people. I left high school, and I was lucky that I could work here."

But in 1971, he saw an opening. With the original owners of the shop looking to walk away, George teamed up with Joslin, an old friend from the neighborhood, and took over the business, later buying the storefront.

It was a gamble, given the high vacancy rates in the South End at the time and the possibility that the block might be scheduled for demolition. But the neighborhood beat back the demolition plans, George and Joslin said, and the business thrived on the backs of blue-collar workers who flocked there.

"I'm from the old school," said John Finn, an elevator mechanic who has been coming to the shop for 33 years and until yesterday still visited there three times a day - for breakfast, a midmorning coffee, and lunch. "Something works, leave it alone. Why paint a car if it doesn't have any dents or chips on it? This place works for me."

But such loyalty was not enough to save the sandwich shop in the shadow of Interstate 93. The changes in the neighborhood - including the loss of metal yards and auto shops claimed during the Big Dig construction - has made business inconsistent, Joslin said. And so, longtime customers understood that their friends had to go.

Marty Sullivan, a gray-haired 25-year regular, came out yesterday to pay his respects. So did James Bailey, who hugged Joslin before walking out the door. And soon, there were tears. Sitting at the corner table, over his usual - an Italian sub - 73-year-old Richard Moccia began to cry.

"Someone must have put an onion in my coffee," he joked, fighting back tears. "I'll have to find another place to go. But people are never the same. Once you lose the old people, the new people are never the same."

The new people are coming, though. It's already planned. Radouan "Rod" Ouassaidi, a 37-year-old father and businessman, will be renting the storefront from George and Joslin, and, in January, hopes to open South End Pita in the space. It'll be Mediterranean food with a Moroccan twist, Ouassaidi said. And while it, too, will serve breakfast and lunch, it will most definitely be different. At night, Ouassaidi said, he wants the restaurant to feel "kind of loungy" with a "New York style."

That'll work for some sandwich shop customers, but not for old-timers like Sullivan, who shook his head yesterday at the thought. He'll take a western omelet, thank you. And others yesterday didn't want to talk about the future at all, preferring instead to live in what was left of the past.

"Best of luck," sandwich shop regular Gregory Sullivan said - first to George and then to Joslin, shaking their hands long and hard. "Enjoy what Monday brings you."

George nodded. Joslin smiled.

But neither man knew for sure what exactly that might be.

Keith O'Brien can be reached at kobrien@globe.com.