sovay | She's a nervous jerk, but still, she's hard to beat

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?

She's a nervous jerk, but still, she's hard to beat

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