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New York circa 1900. "John C. Graul's art store, 217 Fifth Avenue." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company. View full size.
I thought it said Verbiest. I don't want my meats chatting at me.
This window-shopper's ensemble is very finely hand-tailored, and her coat appears to have a velvet collar. Everything fits her perfectly, suggesting that she has access to a private dressmaker. Her hat is equally stylish. Wonder what type of feathers make up that jaunty plume? Notice how carefully coiffed her hair is, and how shiny clean. Knowing from Shorpy how grubby life could be for many people at the time, this lady had it good.
All the $5 Hat Shop had to do at their new location was hold out for another 30 something years and they would have had it made. 359 5th Avenue would put it directly across the street from the Empire State Building which is at 350 5th Avenue.
I would love to be able to get my hands on those paintings being sold in that store. The frames alone are absolutely beautiful.
Somebody's going to be late for the big Gude meeting.
The vacant windows would certainly uphold that sign. Cool and creepy all at the same time.
There are interesting differences between this view of the doomed Brunswick Hotel building, and this one, posted in July.
Upton Sinclair's infamous book "The Jungle" didn't opine that Armour's meats were the Veribest™.
Now we can see where Nestle might have gotten the inspiration for their familiar slogan.
According to a New York Times expose six years later (July 12, 1906), Veribest canned chicken loaf was "a small amount of muscle fibre and a large amount of cornmeal."
This picture is deliciously creepy. The lone woman window shopping in a near-defunct district ... those hauntingly dark windows above her. Thanks for this one, Dave. I love these thrilling peeks into time gone by. Literally they make my day. I'm a bona fide Shorpyholic!
To the train depot. That lady is looking at the very photograph I want on my wall! Thanks Dave, that's funny!
These stores look pretty classy from that genteel age of gracious living. My father was somewhat of a bargain hunter and low-price shopper and I remember in the 1950's going with him into New York every three months or so where he would purchase $1 neckties at a store called Tie City or he'd go to Orchard Street on the Lower East Side to haggle over the price of socks and underwear and even suits and shirts. Once a year or so, he would buy new eyeglasses at Pildes Opticians, which had the newest styles and the lowest prices. We'd buy a wonderfully delicious lunch at Katz's Deli or some cheap Italian pasta emporium whose name I've forgotten. I have inherited the skinflint miserly pennypincher mentality but every once in a while I splurge exorbitantly although I now live far away from N.Y. My father used to tell me that in New York you can get anything from anywhere in the world. I was very impressed and still am.
... on Broadway, and we have O.J. Gude to thank:
It's 1878 in Brooklyn, and my great-great-grandfather O.J. Gude starts an outdoor advertising company with $100 in capital and goes on to pioneer the first use of the electric bulb in a billboard sign in May, 1892. Soon The Great White Way will be born.
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