I live in a grocery store.
Burlington has its fair share of funky, subdivided apartments, but I’ll bet few other places boast wooden, 50-gallon bulk bins built into the living room. One of my roommates sleeps in a former walk-in refrigerator; the other in a space that once served as a loading dock.
Onion River Co-op started in 1971 as a food-buying club whose members pooled money to purchase items in large quantities, some of which were hard to find in Vermont. The club then incorporated as a co-op in 1973 and opened its food distribution center – a warehouse – on Archibald Street. That’s where I have lived for the past year.
My three-bedroom apartment still holds artifacts from its former life as a warehouse.
The place sits across from the historic Pate-King House, a former hotel that goes back a century. The co-op occupied the building where I live until 1990, when it moved to a larger space a few blocks away on North Winooski Avenue by means of a human chain of members who passed the contents to the new location by hand. In 2002, the store moved into the downtown space it inhabits today and took on the name City Market. A South End location opened in 2017.
My three-bedroom apartment still holds artifacts from its former life as a warehouse. I use the bulk bins, coated in decades of white paint, to store coolers and blankets. Wooden shelves in the living room that once held the warehouse’s merchandise serve today as my wine rack. My roommate sleeps behind a 5-inch-thick refrigerator door that helpfully insulates her from the noise of my night-owl shenanigans. Our driveway still has concrete bollards at the end – left over from its days as a custom-built loading dock that accommodated rental trucks full of rolled oats and brown rice, staples of a sensibility.
Our apartment, one of three in the building, makes no secret of its age. You can look up to see weathered, rough-cut rafters that seem to attract dust like a magnet. At your feet, the floor of mismatched planks is so uneven and gap-ridden that you’d swear it was assembled by pot-smoking hippies (which it was). Shoes are recommended to protect against protruding nailheads.
The Archibald Street place morphed from a warehouse and distribution center into a storefront slowly through the 1970s, as the co-op found itself with extra goods to sell. Sales were honor-based at first, in the style of a farmstand: Members left money in a bucket when they took their goods.
Old photos depict a bustling space crammed with produce coolers, racks of jars and self-serve buckets of who-knows-what. One black-and-white photo shows couples dancing in an open area as a band played in the corner. The co-op apparently was a food store and a scene.
“By the time we transitioned to a storefront, we were having tractor-trailer trucks back into this narrow little driveway,” Terry Bouricious, the co-op’s manager in the ’70s and ’80s, told me.
Larry Kupferman, who preceded Terry as store manager, recalled that the massive trucks knocked down my neighbor’s chimney, but only once. It was repaired and still stands there today.
After talking with Terry and Larry, I’m proud to live in a place, quirks and all, that is steeped in the story of people who came together to shake up something as basic as the way we buy food.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Co-op Living. Walk-In Fridge Included.”
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This article appears in The Food Issue 2025.
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