Skip to main content

14th street

 My dad was born on 14th Street in New York City, and at least, c. 2000, the building was still standing. Here's a photo from a trip we made to the city from our home in N.J. (probably to see a Yankee game) in the 1970s. The building is the first brownstone, with Allen's Bar at the ground level.


14st

Here's a close-up shot, with my mom and me standing in front of Allen's Bar. The family had more than one apartment in the building. The family patriarch, my great grandfather Don Peppino, a retired chef, had an office in the front of the building, where he would see patients. After he retired from the restaurant he spent his time as a healer. The family lived in rooms at the back of the building. In summertime Don Peppino would sit out on the roof and dry tomatoes, which he would later use to make sauce. Apparently the building also once featured a stoop, and a shop that sold prosthetics and wheelchairs was the storefront in the 1930s.

14th st

Here's a color polaroid from 1999 or 2000, from when I last lived in NY. The storefront was still a bar, but with a different name, and the bike store was gone. A satellite dish was now on the roof, but for the most part times didn't seem to have changed all that much. I'm not sure what I'd find there today.

349 14 st3

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

the old man...

...it's his birthday today. If he was still around he'd probably want to go see a movie. Is there anything with  Meryl Streep  or  Bill Murray  playing right now? He died in 1993. When he was alive he'd sometimes drive me nuts, inspiring me to intone, "My dad, wrong or wrong!" And I unfortunately seem to have inherited his temper. I'm working on that. But I also inherited his sense of humor, movie buff-ness, interest in art, science and history, and a penchant for getting into a particular subject and then wanting to read everything about it. With me right now, it's the world of Eleanor of Aquitaine. My dad, at different times, had Virginia Woolf, Thomas Jefferson, Cripple Creek, Colorado and the poetry of  Wallace Stevens  as his enthusiasms, to name a few. We all, if we were listening, learned along with him, because along with the temper there comes a genetic tendency to pontificate, or as we call it in our family, breathe. And did I mention the...

a rare find

A rare find - some very old photos from my father's side of the family. They must have belonged to my grandmother, as she made notations on one, and another was inscribed to her.

the tee shirts of my life, #1 — the hometown news

  I have been going through some drawers, trying to clear things out, and found a bunch of old tee shirts that I hadn't seen in ages. Most were saved by my mom, I think. And did they bring me back. It's amazing how something like an old tee shirt could tell a story. For instance, this shirt, from the mid-70s. I didn't know that any of these had survived. My dad was a newspaperman , who worked the political beat for New Jersey papers  The Newark News  and later,  The Daily Observer,  which operates out of Ocean County. In the '70s he decided he wanted to be his own boss and opened a local weekly paper called  The Hometown News . He did everything — wrote the stories, taught my mom and me how to do layout, took and developed the photos in the darkroom (which he taught my brother and me how to do, too), sold advertising (until he could hire someone else to do that),  even delivered the papers  to stores and to the homes of paper boys and girls. And h...