1736 Magazine - Vision for the Future

Luanne Hildebrandt, right, makes a sandwich with some help from Lauren Heddy on a January afternoon at Hildebrandt’s.
[MICHAEL HOLAHAN, THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE]
“We had to hang on, had to let a few
people go in March, and then they chose
not to come back because money was
better for them to stay home, if you know
what I mean,” Hildebrandt said. “But
we’ve been hanging in there most every
day.”
In mid-May, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp
eased restaurants’ customer limits so 10
people at a time could dine on the premises.
By that time, staffers had spent an
entire weekend conducting a deep cleaning
of the entire deli and rearranging tables
and chairs to accommodate social distancing
requirements.
Most of the time the lunch rush didn’t
pose a problem, but at least once an
employee notified Hildebrandt that the
dining area already had reached its limit. “I
told her when it gets to two more, tell ‘em
they can’t come in,” she said.
Because of the reshuffling, Luanne
Hildebrandt’s “office” that typically
stayed near the front of the store had to
move “back where they used to call ‘the
community table,’ where everybody sat at
one big table for when it was groceries up
front and shelves,” she said.
Nearly a year later, she’s still trying to
tidy that new office, reluctant to move it
again.
“I’m not going to put it upstairs because
I’ll never see it again,” she said with a
laugh.
The second floor of Hildebrandt’s is
scattered with more than a century’s
worth of memories. Nicholas Hildebrandt
emigrated from Germany and opened his
grocery in 1879. The original building no
longer stands, but the current building at a
corner of Sixth and Ellis streets is the one
he built in 1896.
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