I am the admin for a 1200+ member group on Facebook; we are a group of reminiscers of the place where we grew up. Stuyvesant Town. A development, a community, built by The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in the late 1940s, built for the WWII veterans who came home to a housing shortage. So, I am one of 1200+ kids who were lucky enough to have grown up there, despite its faults, and I could name a few, (you might just have to read my book), but for now  I will only share the magic of remembrance, the goodness and the warmth.

In this group, some of us have pooled memory to name the stores along the perimeter of the development. Down East 14th Street: Avenue C to Avenue B, Avenue B to Avenue A, Avenue A to First Avenue. And then along First, 14th to 20th Street, then down 20th back to Avenue C. Depending on where your building was in this mini city, that’s where your favorite stores were. Depending on where your mother shopped or where you went to school that’s how your life was expanded. A Howard Johnson’s! A Good Humor store! A Kodak store–remember film? Supermarkets, five and tens, the little restaurants, the hippy gift shop, Zuma, the Plymouth Shop where my mother bought beautiful clothes.

It seemed endless.

I grew up with an East 14th Street address. I best knew the stores along the street and south of it, down Alphabet City, the famous, now East Village where only the vestiges of stores I once knew, from the 1950s, remain or, have been razed. it was a more colorful area: I learned about tenements and poverty. My stores were more humble and smelled of age.

Someone was able to find a photo of MY Woolworth’s! I was joyous!

I can go on, but today my focus will be on Woolworth’s. The “5 and dime,” situated on East 14th Street between Avenues A and B, Long since gone and in its place is an unaffordable condo. It was my Woolworth’s, the place that had pets in the back. Fish tanks, bird cages, turtle tanks. Our first pet was a goldfish during my fifth year of Stuyvesant Town life. (I was born there). But Goldie went belly-up and was subsequently flushed down our Stuyvesant Town toilet. We bought Toby the first and after his demise, Toby the second, who both resided in a plastic, kidney-shaped bowl with the little plastic palm tree they sold for turtles in those days. Some turtles were rogues and managed to escape. My mother learned from a call to the Bronx Zoo, that turtles needed calcium, and the solution for softening of the shell was a ball of plaster of Paris. The Tobys loved lettuce and hamburger meat.

Then there was Gigi, our beloved white Java Temple bird, also called a finch, also called a sparrow, but a rice bird according to Dr. Mortimer W. Weber who made a house call and told us he had seen them during the war in Southeast Asia. They were big in the 50s and were  being trapped for sale and ported over, constantly advertised on kids’ television. Ours was all white with a red bill and likely a male who could sing like Caruso. But he had no mate to sing to, or to woo, and stayed, seemingly happy, in his padoga-shaped blue cage, singing his heart out to pop music on the Grundig radio.

Getting back to Woolworth’s, there was a lunch counter, and house dresses and toys and dolls. There were records, 45’s and 33’s. Alan Sherman’s Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (here I am at Camp Granada) and the music of the Camelot years: Vaughn Meader’s The First Family Album. I see these on a rack in the left front of the store. How I miss JFK!

Here is an image: my mother and I are on line at the cashier and she is buying me a doll. A big doll. And she taps on its cheek (probably trying to figure out what is is made of.) I am a child getting high on this purchase and the smell of the doll’s vinyl. It was the new-car smell for kids. And I say to my mother, “don’t tap on her face, tap on my face!” As if I am protecting my new silent friend from pain and offering some self-sacrifice.

But then there is this.

I can still see it: the name tag. The workers had to wear a name tag. The one I remember said ADELAIDE. It was pinned to a black and white outfit and the lady who wore same also wore a hairnet. Maybe she also worked at the food counter. She skittered around and neatened the compartments on the tables. There was EVENING IN PARIS, in a fancy blue bottle (now available in The Vermont Country Store catalog.) in the “perfume department”.

Years later I was living in Queens and there was a Woolworth’s on Main Street in Flushing and an S. Kleins which I believe became an Alexander’s. How time and place can be mirrored from memory.

I don’t know what I needed or what I was looking for, but in I went after getting off the 7 train from Manhattan, post-work. Maybe it was for the nostalgia, or the odor of the food counter, or to see the EVENING IN PARIS bottles stacked in a compartment on a table. But I did find what I was looking for, and I didn’t even know I was looking: It was ADELAIDE, in her hairnet, passing in front of me. A older specter from the past, connected to my then-present. There she was. It HAD to be the same woman, after all, how many girls are named ADELAIDE? And how many will forever be in my memory of Woolworth’s?

What is your favorite store memory?