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‘End of an era’: Saslove’s Meat Market to close after 70 years in the ByWard Market

August 1, 2024

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After a childhood spent helping out at his family’s butcher shop, John Diener took over ownership of Saslove’s Meat Market in the 1980s. On Wednesday, the popular ByWard Market retailer announced on Facebook it would be closing its doors after 70 years in business. For Diener, the shuttering of his family’s business is the “end of an era.” Diener, 70, has seen the butchery and the Market go through decades of change, but he says the pandemic was “the last straw” for Saslove’s – and that downtown revitalization plans are “too late.” “(Saslove’s) has been in the family for 70 years. My brother and I took it over from my parents, and it was a good business,” Diener told OBJ on Thursday. “We made a very good living from it. “In this market 50 years ago, it was almost all food retail stores for blocks. There were 11 or 12 butcher shops here in the 1960s, there were multiple fruit and vegetable stores, a couple of fish stores, and now we're hanging on with one of each,” he explained. Changes in the Market aren’t new; Diener said he’s seen a pattern of problems in the neighbourhood that local government has been “too slow” to address. “They do these studies and programs, they pay big dollars on it, then they get the results back, and they look at it for three or four years and do nothing,” he said. “Then they decide that it's too late to tackle these problems that were there five years ago. “This has been going on repeatedly over the years.” The ByWard Market has been facing a string of closures of local businesses as the popular tourist area continues to grapple with concerns about safety and the ongoing homelessness and mental health crisis downtown, as well as rising costs and a lack of traffic in the downtown core. In February, the historic Courtyard Restaurant announced it would be closing after more than 40 years in business on George Street. In 2020, The Fish Market Restaurant said it was shutting down after 41 years in the Market, saying the COVID-19 crisis “devastated” its business. In January, the Downtown Ottawa Revitalization Task Force, which was formed in 2022 by Ottawa Centre MP Yasir Naqvi, released its long-anticipated report after several months of delay. The report includes a number of recommendations on how to breathe new life into the city’s struggling downtown core. The Ottawa Board of Trade released its own downtown action plan in May that called for measures that will result in annual economic benefits of more than $1.3 billion, versus a “do-nothing” annual loss of property taxes and other payments of at least $62 million. But Diener said for many businesses like Saslove’s, it’s simply “too late.” “I kind of gave up on these things a long time ago. I've seen enough promises over the years to not really expect anybody to follow through with these things,” he said. “I think the intent is there … but everything is too slow. “They get recommendations and they don't act on it, or they get around to looking at it years later. There've been so many meetings over the years where the city has come out and said, ‘We're going to do this, we're going to do that,’ and nothing happens.” In an effort to provide a united voice to represent the Market, The ByWard Market District Authority was formed in 2021, combining the former ByWard Market BIA and Marchés d’Ottawa Market to serve as a new governance structure. For Diener, though, enough was enough when it came to his decision to close Saslove’s. “It's been a slow progression of change in the Market over the years, but COVID hastened it a bit,” he explained. “Everything costs more now. We're paying more for everything, and you just can't keep on throwing money into something that's not profitable. “I turned 70 this year, and my plan was to have been out by now. I figured, about five or six years ago, that I’d give it another year to try to build up the business to be a bit more sellable,” Diener continued. “And then COVID hit, of course, and those plans got thrown out the window, and it hasn't come back. We haven't shown a profit since 2019, so who's going to buy a business like that?” Diener lives just three blocks from the store, so he said he’ll still be involved in the community and running into customers and friends on a daily basis. Since announcing the closure, he said he’s been responding to a stream of emails from friends, customers and former employees expressing their love for the business. After watching his family grow the store, then owning and operating it himself, he said there have been “huge changes over my lifetime,” and while he says he still loves the Market, his outlook for businesses in the neighbourhood isn’t optimistic. “I think if things could have done better 10 years ago, when they were supposed to be addressed and fixed, we'd be in a much better situation,” he said. “But I think it's too late at this point, because there's just not much left to bring back.”