New owners: Candy store's sweet tradition is safe

Old customers who bought their Mother's Day boxed assortments at Shane Candies in Old City over the weekend would have been startled to see the venerable shop Tuesday - its display windows stripped bare, a Philabundance truck hauling off 1,000 pounds of donated chocolates, the retiring owner Barry Shane, 66, overseeing a daunting clean-out.

The old-fashioned candy shop at 110 Market St. - long advertised by the third generation of Shanes as "America's Oldest Candy Store" - had been sold the day before to the Berley brothers (Ryan and Eric), who own Franklin Fountain, the vintage ice cream parlor a few doors to the west, near Second and Market.

The impetus for the sale was no mystery: Barry Shane said he'd watched the value of the real estate climb exponentially in recent years, far outstripping the value of the business. (Also, no other family member was in the wings, waiting to carry the torch.)

The impetus for the purchase was just as understandable: The leased space above Honey's Sit 'n Eat in Northern Liberties where the Berleys make ice cream was being eyed for kitchen expansion.

And just as important, Ryan Berley said, was the brothers' long-held determination to recast the seasonal ice cream business as a year-round enterprise: Making chocolates in colder months would enable them to offer steadier employment to staff.

It was a bittersweet scene in the back shop yesterday afternoon, Shane shoveling down his lunch from a paper plate, reflecting on the changes in the commercial landscape: "Twenty-thousand people a day passed by here before the Ben Franklin Bridge was built," he said. That was in 1926, and candy shops dotted Old City, in part to sell to the crowds catching the Delaware River ferries shuttling to Camden and back before the bridge went up.

The shop will remain closed until at least October. But after that, the Berleys say they'll reopen under the Shane name, continuing its increasingly rare tradition of hand-crafting on the premises, and, in fact, using old-school techniques Shane has offered to teach them.

The Berleys, who paid $500,000 for the four-story, 1857-vintage loft building (and an undisclosed sum for the business), say they're devoted to restoring it to its glory days - refurbishing the carved mahogany details, installing period fixtures, even using antique jars and rolling pins they've collected from other local candy makers who have recently closed up shop.

Shane endured lean years. Sugar rationing during World War II was a rough patch. Then in 1974, its block of Market was torn up for a new subway stop at Second Street.

But for decades it was an Old City landmark, holiday lines jamming the aisles for its famed butter creams and chocolate-covered marshmallows, its windows of satiny hearts, beribboned baskets and Christmas boxes reliable bellwethers of the season.

The Shane family has operated the shop since 1911. The claim that it has been a candy store continuously since 1876 is more difficult to document.