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?

Tell all your neighbors I'm a fisher

In lesser news of the day, I was violently street-harassed for the first time in a couple of years: not physically, but a total stranger of a dude pulled his mask off and screamed obscenities at me from a distance of six to ten feet because, I guess, I had the temerity to walk toward him on the same narrowly carved channel of sidewalk between snowbanks as opposed to retreating or wading out into traffic and leaving his balls an unopposed right of way. I assume his masculinity was feeling fragile because he called me bitch. I walked past him and his unmasked face.

In better news, I visited some bridges.

( That's where all the wishes are. )

I got back and we ordered dinner immediately from Southern Kin Cookhouse, since we had been desperately missing the fried chicken of the delicious, departed Highland Fried; this was different and quite good and Rob ate most of his meal with an Autolycus craning earnestly over his elbow, even after the little darling had been bribed. Neither biscuits nor key lime pie are safe with that cat around. I believe we are going to try to watch something fun.