The Review

Issue date: 10/23/07 Section: Mosaic

Media Credit: File Photo

As visitors walk into Bing's Bakery on the east end of Main Street, they may feel as though they have walked through a time warp. Wooden hutches with porcelain knobs hold antique teacups and napkins, and Halloween-themed sugar cookies are piled on tabletops and counters throughout the store. Glass cases line three sides of the bakery, housing a variety of baked goods, including petite fours, strudels, danishes, butter cookies and cupcakes iced to look like Elmo.

Bing's Bakery is a living testament to Mom-and-Pop stores, which have been declining in popularity. Tom and Carla Guzzi purchased the store from its original owners, Russell and Selina Bing, in 2005. The Bings had previously owned the store since 1946, cementing it as a Newark landmark.

Painted in a warm, buttery yellow with white trim, Bing's façade almost looks like the buttercream cakes housed inside. Carla says Bing's is off the beaten track of Main Street, and for this reason, often goes overlooked by students.

"We're on the tail end of Main Street so we aren't in a spot where we get a lot of walk-in university students," Guzzi says. "Our client base varies - there's a mix of all ages and backgrounds, from all over the area."

The reason Bing's is able to attract visitors from Elkton to Avondale is because they are what is known as a scratch bakery, meaning Bing's actually uses flour and mixing ingredients to make a cake.

Carla says an example of this is the store's famous butter cookies, which are actually made with butter. At supermarkets and other mass-quantity food retailers, the butter cookies aren't made with their namesake ingredient.

"Supermarkets are killing the industry of bakeries," she says. "To find scratch bakers has been difficult for us. The trade of a scratch baker, to me, is really not where it needs to be. More and more you are finding people who can't even ice a cake."

Maureen Feeney Roser, administrator of the Downtown Newark Partnership and assistant planning director for the city, says Main Street is conducive to small, independent businesses like Bing's Bakery.

"Main Street is a unique environment," Feeney Roser says. "The open-air environment and the buildings, which are all different and built over a period of 300 years, lend themselves to unique little retail stores."

She also raises the point that independent businesses are valuable for the local economy.

Continued...

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