On the waterfront

[31 President Street, Waterfront District, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Just some grocery store in the Waterfront District. Notice in the windows the signage for White Rose Tea, a brand once ubiquitous in New York. Notice too the three gentlemen standing on the corner. The guy on the right certainly looks ready for his close-up. He puts me in mind of Tony Galento, the ex-fighter who played Truck in On the Waterfront. And here we are, on the waterfront.

And if you look closely, you can see next to the corner store an outpost of the International Longshoremen’s Association.

The corner store and several adjacent President Street properties are now gone. In their place today, GreenSpace@President Street, a community garden. The darker brick building past the fire hydrant, 115 Van Brunt Street, is the only building still standing on that block.

[Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : A short history of White Rose, Inc. : White Rose pencils, from the collection of my late friend Sean Malone