Scenes from my past - Part Nine

This place doesn't look like much but it was the closest market to our house. It was a store when you could buy everything you needed in a hurry. When I was nine years old my mother would often send me to the Henry Street market to pick up milk or lunch meat or pork chops for dinner. They had a big rack of candy bars. For a nickel you could buy a giant Hershey bar or a Sky Bar or maybe a really big Baby Ruth. All the soda came in returnable glass bottles. The 36 oz were worth a nickel, which we traded in for said candy. And they had spinning racks of comic books from Archie, to superheros to true romance. But they wouldn't sell you cigarettes there if you were underage. You had to go to Harry the Gyp for that. He'd sell them to anybody.

The store was about six blocks from my house. You had to cross two busy streets. Nobody thought anything about letting a nine year old make the trek alone.

And right across the street, back then, was Demo's Dry Cleaning. It belonged to my neighborbood friend Geraldine's father. Sadly, I don't have a photo of that.

[Photos are better if you click on them to embiggen.]