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Riad Shatila opened his first bakery in 1979 on a very different Warren Avenue in a very different Dearborn. That shop occupied just a thousand square feet, with a glass case up front and a modest bakery operation in the back. At the time, there were virtually no other stores around \u2014 the town’s Italian and Polish population had largely flocked to homes near shopping malls in the fancier suburbs farther west \u2014 and certainly there were none selling Lebanese sweets. Haider Koussan, who in 1993 started Dearborn’s Greenland Market grocery chain with his brothers in a small storefront on Warren Avenue, described the area even in the eighties as “a ghost town, all rundown buildings.” The city-block-sized space that\u2019s now Super Greenland, the largest of Koussan\u2019s five stores, was an abandoned, asbestos-filled movie theater called Camelot. “It was scary,” Koussan remembered. “There was nothing there.”<\/span><\/p>\n Written by Michael Snyder and Ali Saloum<\/p>\n