She's a nervous jerk, but still, she's hard to beat
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selkie sent me a link to an interactive map of New York City in the 1940's, specifically a digitized archive of photos taken between 1939–41 by the WPA in collaboration with the New York City Tax Department.I found my great-grandfather's pharmacy at 1036 Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn.
I'd never seen a picture of it. None came down in our family. I had to find out the address from public records as an adult. I got stories: my grandmother playing as a child with beads of mercury that ran together and shivered in her palm; my great-grandfather who liked beer and liked chocolate milkshakes anticipating a craft brewery trend by at least seventy years and discovering he didn't like the taste. My grandmother who went to Brooklyn College at sixteen must have lived at home; it would have been a fifteen-minute walk at most. I don't remember when the business closed—it survived my great-grandfather, but not the '70's—but it wasn't even a pharmacy by the time
spatch and I went looking in the early 2010's. And there it is now, not just as in my grandmother's youth, but as I could see her father behind the counter if I stepped through that door. Maybe the photographers went in for a fountain soda afterward. Looks like a hot day. I held on to Rob: I hadn't expected to find it. How am I expected to believe ordinarily in time when there it is in front of me, waiting for a streetcar on the Smith Street Line?
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*hugs*
It is important to put a pin in the map, when one can. And it really is just an extraordinary photograph, as if the moment the shutter clicked could come effortlessly back again and we could step into the crosswalk toward it. Do you know how hard it is to get a lime rickey in this decade?
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"Not really now not any more."
Do you know how hard it is to get a lime rickey in this decade?
All through my childhood and for years after, I got them from the Brigham's on the corner of Park and Mass. Ave. in Arlington Heights! Which hasn't existed for nearly a decade itself, the storefront is now an optometrist's, but I still feel it should be possible to order a grilled cheese, a lime rickey, and a small cone of pistachio ice cream somewhere in this world.
*hugs*
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Triple weird score.
...do you think we had some amount of linear time to our names and dropped and broke it in a kitchen accident circa 2004?
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I think we were born without it, like people who don't feel jealousy or taste the soap in cilantro.