Little Market That Could: It No Longer Can : Development: Competition and falling profits spell doom for a venerable ‘mom-and-pop’ operation. It will make way for a new retail center.

Dwarfed by modern supermarkets and threatened by shrinking profits, it was the little market that could.

Now it can’t.

Riverside Market, which has stood at the same North Hollywood intersection for more than 40 years, will close early next month. The property is being sold to a developer who may replace it with a retail center containing a bank, gift shop and real estate brokerage firm.

“It’s the end of a neighborhood institution,” said Tom Paterson, president of the Valley Village Homeowners Assn. “There aren’t very many like it around.”

Three generations of the Damus family have run the one-story, white grocery store at Riverside Drive and Laurel Canyon Boulevard since it opened in the mid-1940s. Back then it was an open-air market and offered locally grown oranges, corn and apricots. Despite diminishing annual returns--last year’s profits plunged to only about $25,000--the family has kept the store open until 2 a.m. daily, 365 days a year.

Now the market, which was enclosed in the 1950s and has low ceilings and exposed rafters, looks half-naked, with its shelves stripped of canned goods and freezers sitting empty.

“It was our second home for 40 years, but it can’t be helped,” said Vic Damus Sr., 70, who bought the store eight months before the end of World War II. The elder Damus has leukemia and has largely left the closing of the store and the dismissal of its 15 employees to his son Mike and other children.

“It’s been a tough situation all along because of Price Club and the warehouse supermarkets,” said Mike Damus, 33. “There’s a 50-50 chance we’ll relocate in south Van Nuys or Studio City.”

The “mom-and-pop” stores are “a dying breed” and are closing all over the state, said Don Beaver, president of the Sacramento-based California Grocers Assn. Beaver said his group does not keep such statistics, but he estimates that close to half of the state’s 20,000 grocery stores are former small markets that have been converted to quick-stop convenience stores.

“It’s progress,” Beaver said.

A woman shopping in the Riverside Market this week agreed, saying she “never trusted” the store because its meat and produce is displayed in older cases instead of shiny new ones. But longtime patron Roger Knight, a movie set dresser in his late 30s, said the store’s passing will leave a void in the community. Knight was buying rabbit and stuffed pork chops, prepared to order by the store’s butcher.

“This is the kind of place that if you were short on cash, they’d let you go home and bring back the money later,” Knight said. “It has a neighborhood feel. I wish they’d find another place for that shopping center.”

“It’s like a little piece of home,” said Patt Bellevilli, 28, who moved from Detroit to North Hollywood last year. “I hate big grocery stores because you never meet your neighbors there.”

The property is being bought by Long Beach developer Bob Champion, who declined Tuesday to reveal the purchase price. One of the conditions of sale was that the market and a nearby florist shop and shoe repair store be vacated, said Tom Leanse, an attorney for the Damus family.

Champion said he may raze the stores and build three one-story buildings that would be occupied by a bank and other new businesses. Another option is to renovate the existing buildings, but he said they are in poor condition.

Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs, who occasionally shops at the market, said he hopes Champion will consult with residents’ groups before developing the property. If Champion does not, “then to the extent that I have leverage, I’ll use it” to influence city decisions on development of the site, Wachs said.