Camden’s beloved Bell Pharmacy celebrates its 90th anniversary

Bell Rexall Pharmacy had already stood at the corner of Kaighn and Haddon Avenues in Camden for 21 years by the time Paul Rosen landed his first job there in 1952.

After school and on weekends, Rosen stocked the shelves with Alka-Seltzer, Dixie Peach Pomade, and bottles of women’s cologne. He stuffed small plastic bags with candies: cherry slices, gumdrops, chocolate coins, and ice blue mint squares. But mostly, he remembers the atmosphere.

“The people that owned it treated you like you were coming home for dinner when you walked in,” said Rosen, a veteran attorney. “They knew your name and everything about your family. Bell Rexall Pharmacy was synonymous with Camden.” When he came across a feature of Bell Pharmacy in the January 2021 issue of Philadelphia Style, he was impressed that it was still open for business.

The pharmacy on Tuesday celebrates its 90th anniversary, making it one of Camden’s oldest family-owned pharmacies. It was opened in 1931 by the pharmacy’s namesake, Henry Bellitz. In 1946, Max Schwartz took over and remained the owner and pharmacist in charge until his retirement in 1997.

That year, he sold it to the Doganiero family, which had their own 50-year legacy in Camden’s pharmacy industry before buying Bell. Today, the pharmacy is still run by the Doganieros with family members Anthony Minniti and his sister Marian Morton at the helm. The key to the pharmacy’s longevity, Minniti believes, is having deep connections to the community it serves. Bell Pharmacy has solidified its reputation as steadfast and dependable to residents of Camden, particularly those in the LGBTQ community.

“We’re going to celebrate 90 days recognizing 90 years,” Minniti, 50, said. “We will encourage the public to share their memories and experiences of Bell Pharmacy,” on the pharmacy’s Facebook page and website.

Margaret David lives close to Bell Pharmacy and said she has over a decade of memories to share. Once a month, she visits Bell to pick up her “survival kit,” an assortment of vitamins, blood pressure medication, and her asthma pump.

“There have been times that I’ve gone in there, dealing with personal health stuff, the workers just make you feel so comfortable,” David said. “Camden gets a bad rap sometimes, but they’ve hung in there all of these years and I really appreciate that.”

Under Minniti’s leadership, Bell Pharmacy has become a hub for the health needs of Camden’s LGBTQ community, offering such services as PrEP counseling, HIV medication and therapy, and hormone treatments.

Minniti has a close friend who is queer, and throughout the friendship, he’s learned about some of the struggles that those in the LGBTQ community face.

“I felt the horror of the AIDS epidemic far more than most. I lost friends and also had to console those that were left behind,” Minniti said. “For some who contracted HIV, I had to be professional in helping them address the clinical side while remaining the supportive friend when the gravity of their situation overwhelmed them.”

Minniti believes in a “one-visit solution” philosophy when it comes to caring for queer communities. “We want to remove as many barriers as possible and make it as easy, safe, and discreet as possible” for members of the LGBTQ community to receive care, he said. “I committed personally to do this, because it’s something I deeply believe in. It’s not a business model per se as much as what I find to be a moral imperative.”

In 2019, Bell Pharmacy underwent a major exterior renovation, complete with new, glossy orange-and-navy signage, a nod to the pharmacy’s original look. Throughout its years, the pharmacy has endured riots and urban decay, which forced the owners to board up their storefront. But now, the Parkside neighborhood is seeing such improvements as road repairs and a new charter school.

Inside the pharmacy, there’s an area that mimics a museum exhibit. Dozens of pharmaceutical relics — a midcentury mortar and pestle, glass prescription bottles, and old scales, for example — are permanently displayed in the front of the store.

“The purpose of the museum is to give younger residents the ability to see, firsthand and not on the internet, what an old pharmacy was like,” Minniti said. “That’s also how we built our branding — we redid the store to its 1940s-1950s look.”

Like Rosen, Joseph Schwartz’s first job was at Bell Pharmacy, in 1966. The son of longtime owner Max Schwartz, Joseph Schwartz started stocking shelves and running small errands at 8, and when he was tall enough, his father allowed him to work the cash register.

“It was a family thing. It was our second home,” Joseph Schwartz said. When his father boarded up the pharmacy amid the riots after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “there were people on the corner waving the rioters away, and they spray-painted ‘Don’t touch this building.’”