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?
no subject
I also think it is, actually, snazzy.
So it sounds like you and spatch were able to find the building, but that it's no longer used as a pharmacy?
It was a halal fast-food place when we were there! I was informed this afternoon by a friend not on DW that the block suffered a fire recently and am hoping fiercely that the businesses come back rather than the building just ends up razed. I feel sort of third-hand protective of it.
How great, though, to be able to rub away the grime of intervening time via this photograph and see it as it was!
I'd had no idea the documentary project was even done. I'm so glad it was.