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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"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.