My Back Pages - Bird’s Grocery
Most of these mom-and-pop grocery stores (with the apartment on top) had started in the 1920s, and there may have even been a few remaining in the 1970s whose owners had operated it since it had opened!
With the rise of chain convenience stores, this old style grocery may have already succumbed to the modern trend by the time this picture was taken. Some were re-purposed as art studios.
“But now… when that world is no more… the spirits rise up from the well of oblivion. People and pictures from a vanished world are reincarnated and assume a significance which was hidden at the time.” ~ Halldór Laxness, The Fish Can Sing
2 Comments:-
BobTheScientist said...
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Professor Batty said...
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Ah, bygones. In ~1975, when we were courting, my then g.f. now wife decided she'd appear at the flat I shared [with three accountants] and cook high tea for me. She stopped by the Mom&Pop grocery a block away and, with some indulgent advice from Mrs Green the Grocer, came away with two eggs, 4 rashers of bacon, half a pound of sausages and a tomato in a paper bag. It's a Eurospar convenience store now; which is not the same thing at all at all.
Wonderful story of a different time, when the grocer would help one along the way of the path of true love. Almost Dickensian.
I still remember the couples that ran them, the Magnussons's when I was a young child, the Elledges, when I was older and the couple that ran the grocery near my high school.
Those grocery stores all had the same look as the one in the picture above.
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