Near the corner of East 14^th Street and Avenue B there was an entrance to a store that was recessed from the building line and had two pillars; the façade was covered in red and mirror mosaics, making the entrance a bit hidden from the rest of the store doorways, but it beckoned in its exoticism.

When I pulled the door open I was hit by the odor of sugar and bread. Bakery products were made in the store, not in some central commissary; the smell was magic and this was my version of a Proustian madeleine, evoking my early days, providing a synesthesia of the senses and a terrific, painful nostalgia.

In the 1950s, off to the upper right, were little Easter ducklings and chicks, real baby fowl that were now sitting on a shelf motionless with black plastic eyes and frozen, dry bills. My father bought me one during a visit on a hot, Spring day during the holidays. A dead, baby duck. Why on earth would anyone supply kids with such a prize is beyond me, but I LOVED that little yellow fellow with his webbed feet, and for years he sat in my mother’s mirrored curio box, motionless and fuzzy, near the birdcage. In the dining room.

My little, yellow fuzzy duck was purchased at The Town Rose Bakery, of all places. Behind the counter was Millie. Millie with the long red nails who could yank the red and white string out of its hanging pod and tie a cake box in seconds. I could barely see her head over the glass, maybe because I was small and she was small. But those nails could work their magic, tie the knots and hand over a white Town Rose box after the exchange of money.

My father used to flirt with Millie. This was interesting. I was a small observer who made mental notations and subsequently mental movies. My father, a heavy-set, short, bespectacled and shy man, would engage in banter with the raven-haired Millie, as he did with the sharp waitresses at Hammer’s Dairy Restaurant on 2^nd Avenue. I mean, is this what men did? I never saw him so happy, so cheerful, like he achieved something, like he got a good report card. All this joy from picking up a corn bread or rye, or pumpernickel. And a bag of fresh warm rolls for Sunday breakfast. Millie. What was the magic? We’d go home, and he was back to his old self.

The onion rolls were the magic. The bread, seeded or not. Always sliced in the old machine with ribs that jiggled and cut through the dough with a noise that drowned out any conversation. The bialys, soft and doughy and powdery. The bagels of all colors with all kinds of seeds. Still warm.

The white paper bags of baked dough were more valuable than money and they were ported home to accompany butter, cream cheese, scrambled eggs, coffee. Sometimes, thinly sliced lox. And the Sunday, The New York Times, with Abe Hirschfeld’s cartoons. But I never knew of NINA until much later. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Hirschfeld]

Nesselrode Pie

The cakes sat behind the glass counter, chilled, with a hint of condensation on the dark chocolate. My mother would occasionally get a Charlotte Russe or a Nesselrode pie, desserts which somehow made no sense to me. Or did she order those from Junior’s in Brooklyn?

Charlotte Russe

Into the 1960s. I would stop at Town Rose on my way home from Seward Park High School. I’d alight from the Avenue A bus, walk down to the corner of “B” and pick up a quart of milk from the fridge on the left side of the store and “half of a large seeded rye, sliced.” Later that evening after I did my homework a couple of slices of that rye morphed into the next day’s sandwich: my favorite was tuna and American cheese, and by the time my lunch period came around it was soggy through and through but it was still great. Or, my bread or roll was filled with ham and cheese, the contents purchased at Gristedes, or the Pioneer Market, salami from Koburn’s Deli on the corner of 13^th and B. My lunch was limited to a tight rotation, but never boring, and the bread, that bread from Town Rose was always divine.