The Watermelon Man of 52nd and Spruce

A hand painted banner in mint green and red spells out DOV-BES CARTER’S WATERMELONS along the sidewalk at 52nd and Spruce, propped against a wall of black diamond melons stacked two and three deep in cardboard crates. Underneath the name somebody has painted a line that works as both a slogan and a small dare: It’s Not Just Watermelons. I write these Philadelphia dispatches as Harry Hayman, and I had driven past this corner more times than I can count without ever actually pulling over, which is its own quiet confession about how a person can pass the same block for years and never really see what is happening on it. Two men behind the crates walked me through black seeds, brown seeds, seedless, sugar babies, telling me which ones run sweeter and which run juicier the way another vendor might describe a vintage. I could not pick just one. So I bought three, which is exactly the outcome a good salesperson is built to produce, and I drove off with watermelons rattling in the trunk and considerably more curiosity than I had arrived with.

What Harry Hayman Found at the Watermelon Stand

At street level the operation is simple. Two folding tables, a stack of cardboard crates, and more black diamond watermelons than I have ever seen gathered in one place, each one round and nearly black skinned, some the size of a soccer ball or bigger. A second banner nearby reads CARTER’S MELONS SUGAR BABIES, its printed photograph faded from years of Philadelphia sun, promising the smaller, sweeter icebox variety stacked underneath the bigger melons out front. The men running the stand did not just sell me a watermelon. They ran a short course in watermelons. Black seeded ones for people who grew up spitting seeds off a porch, brown seeded for a milder bite, seedless for anyone who wants none of that ceremony at all, and sugar babies for people who want a whole melon they can actually finish alone. When I said I could not decide, nobody tried to close the sale. They just kept describing, patiently, the way somebody talks about a subject they have spent an entire life inside. I ended up leaving with one of each, three watermelons for a car built to carry two adults and a bag of groceries, and every one of them turned out to be exactly as good as promised.

Four Generations Behind the Sign

The name on the banner, DOV-BES, is not decoration. According to reporting in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the family opened this location at 52nd and Spruce as a tribute to Dover and Bessie Carter, shortening their names into a single word the way people do when they want a name to fit on a sign and still carry the whole story. Dover Carter had been an NAACP organizer in Georgia, registering Black voters, when he was beaten badly enough that he and his wife Bessie moved the family north to Philadelphia in the late nineteen forties. By around 1950 he was selling watermelons on a Philadelphia corner, and the business the Inquirer traces has now run for seventy five years. The stand moved a few times early on, through 35th and Mantua and 37th and Brown according to WHYY’s reporting, before the family settled into its longtime home along Lindbergh Boulevard in Southwest Philadelphia in the mid nineteen eighties. The 52nd and Spruce location is newer, opened within the last two years to bring the family’s watermelons into West Philadelphia proper. Today the operation runs through Joshua Carter, who has worked a stand since he was five years old, and his son Jeremiah, who has sold watermelons since he was seven and now works as a certified peer specialist the rest of the year. A great many nieces, nephews, and grandchildren rotate through the family’s locations every summer, which is its own kind of continuity. The family is teaching the next generation how to run a produce stand at the same time it is teaching them how a family stays a family.

The Corner With a Longer Memory

52nd Street did not become a produce corridor by accident. For much of the twentieth century it was known, informally, as Black Main Street, a strip of jazz clubs, movie theaters, and Black owned businesses that the Philadelphia Inquirer has described as a place that once wedded economic prosperity to cultural cache. Suburbanization, a prolonged transit renovation at the 52nd Street El stop, and decades of disinvestment hollowed a lot of that out, and today, by the accounting in the Philadelphia Citizen’s reporting on a recent investment plan for the corridor, only about four in ten businesses along 52nd Street are Black owned even though the surrounding neighborhood is roughly three quarters Black, and a quarter of the building stock needs real renovation. None of that is the kind of thing you notice standing in front of a pile of watermelons. It is the kind of thing that decides whether a stand like this one has a corner to stand on at all. The Enterprise Center, a nonprofit economic development organization, has spent years working the other side of that problem, and Billy Penn has reported on a million dollars in federal funding the organization received in 2022 to help revitalize the 52nd Street corridor specifically. The City of Philadelphia lists its own 52nd Street commercial corridor improvement project among its complete streets programs, and in 2024 the Inquirer covered an oral history project called Legacy on 52nd Street, built to record the corridor’s business owners in their own words before that history disappears the way so much oral history does. A watermelon stand is a small thing to hang all of that on. It also would not exist without it.

How You Pick a Melon Without a Knife

None of the Carters use the trick most of us grew up hearing about, thumping for a hollow sound while checking for a yellow field spot. What multiple reporters, including WHYY and CBS Philadelphia, have described instead is closer to something learned from an instrument than from a manual. The family cradles a melon like a baby and thumps it, tuning in to its vibrations and tone the way a luthier checks a guitar body before it leaves the shop. Joshua Carter told CBS Philadelphia that the whole approach comes down to matching the fruit to the person standing in front of him. “We try to give a person a melon tailor made to their desire,” he said. “Just like you would go and get a dress made or a suit made to your desire.” That philosophy is why the stand carries so many varieties at once, yellow meat, orange meat, red meat, sangria, jubilee melons sometimes called rattlesnakes for their striping, and the compact sugar babies that Elijah Carter, one of Joshua’s brothers, has called his personal favorite. Watermelon season here runs roughly from April through September, seven days a week, with prices that move with wholesale cost and typically land somewhere between seven and twenty five dollars depending on size. None of that is complicated. It is just knowledge, built up over decades and handed down inside one family, applied to a piece of fruit most of us buy without thinking about it twice.

A License, a Truck, and What Food Access Actually Looks Like

Selling fruit on a Philadelphia sidewalk is not actually free of paperwork, even when it feels like the most informal transaction in the city. The Department of Licenses and Inspections requires a Neighborhood Vending license for anyone selling outside Center City, on top of a business tax account, a general commercial activity license, and for food specifically, sign off from the city’s health department. None of that is new. An essay from the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia traces street vending in this city back to the colonial period, when pepper pot soup sellers, many of them free Black women, became locally famous for feeding working people who had nowhere else, and nowhere as cheap, to buy a meal. That history matters because it means what I watched happen at 52nd and Spruce is not a nostalgic throwback. It is the same economic function, still working, in a neighborhood where it still matters. The Philadelphia Department of Public Health now runs a program called Philly Loves Fresh specifically because produce trucks and stands in West and Southwest Philadelphia fill a gap that grocery stores in those same neighborhoods do not always close, and the USDA’s own Food Access Research Atlas keeps mapping census tracts across the city where residents live more than half a mile from the nearest large grocery store without reliable access to a car. A watermelon stand will not fix a supply chain by itself. What it does is put fresh food, priced by the pound and picked by hand, directly on a corner people already walk past every day, which is a kind of infrastructure the city has never quite figured out how to build on purpose.

What I Keep Thinking About

I think about the phone number painted in red on that banner more than I expected to, mostly because it means the stand takes delivery orders now, which is either a small concession to how everybody shops in 2026 or a sign that the family sees exactly how much further this corner could reach. Either way, I have already decided I am going back before the season ends in September, because black diamonds like the ones stacked against that wall do not keep past a few weeks, and I want to taste the sugar baby before the boxes empty out and the banner comes down until next April. Somewhere between the first bite and the drive home I stopped thinking of the stand as a nice local business and started thinking of it as evidence, the kind you can hold in your hand, that a corner does not need permission from anybody downtown to matter. It just needs somebody willing to stand behind a folding table, year after year, until the whole block learns to expect them.