![]() The store has a calming palate of muted grays and greens. Of course, there’s still that undercurrent of grief, which will never leave. “The key to life is to get back to living,” said shopper Alan Hall, who lives two blocks away from the Jefferson Avenue store. Some also received Tops gift cards - the store planned to hand out more than 200 of them, a representative confirmed. On Friday morning, store associates handed single carnations to customers as they entered the newly reopening store. “I’ll be honest, those are the people that we really wanted to listen to, the people that were in the neighborhood, the people that were in the Jefferson Avenue neighborhood and the immediate community to find out what their thoughts were,” Persons said. Ultimately, the management team felt confident that store associates and most area residents needed and wanted the store to reopen. Almost immediately, the company started running a free shuttle from the neighborhood to other Tops stores. Tops President John Persons said Thursday that the company began hearing from customers, community members and civic leaders the day after the May 14 shooting. On the other hand, polishing store fixtures and floors is a far cry from addressing the systemic inequality and unhealed trauma in east Buffalo’s Black community, several residents said. The arrival of Tops in 2003 was a godsend to an area that had been considered a food desert. On the one hand, residents fought for years to win a grocery store on Buffalo’s east side, which had long suffered from disinvestment and lackluster economic activity. That’s why frequent shoppers, the store’s managers and employees, community leaders and those who lost loved ones in the hail of bullets two months ago tell The Associated Press simply: It’s complicated. Tops is the social hub of its neighborhood. That was one theater in a 16-screen suburban cineplex. It took six months for a movie theater to reopen in Aurora, Colorado, after a mass shooter killed 12 people there in 2012. It’s a different sort of hard when it’s a place of business, especially one as central to a community as Tops is to east Buffalo. It’s hard enough to answer those questions when it’s a school, a church, a synagogue. How do you decide how, when or even whether to let the site of a mass atrocity return to being what it was before it was a crime scene? How do you help people move forward without erasing the memory of an event that devastated so many? ![]() The produce at Tops is fresher than the foods available at smaller convenience stores and bodegas in the neighborhood, she said. Her 97-year-old father, a World War II veteran, lives close enough to the market to shop there on his own. Yet even Horne carries the mixed emotions of seemingly everyone in the community, where the store has doubled as a gathering spot for two decades.
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