[With apologies to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.]
[285 Broadway, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
Childs restaurants were once ubiquitous in New York. The 1940 telephone directories show one in Queens (at the World’s Fair) and a handful in Brooklyn. In Manhattan, they march up Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Broadway: 47, 196, 285, 351, &c. And they were elsewhere. Like Duane Reades, they were everywhere.
From the song “Manhattan”:
We’ll go to Yonkers,Wikipedia has an excellent article about “Manhattan” that makes clear something I never understood when much younger: the song’s lyrics are about a couple without much money, seeking frugal delights. The Childs chain offered inexpensive food.
where true love conquers in the wild.
And starve together, dear, in Childs.
Wikipedia has a detailed article about Childs, complete with menus. A search for “childs restaurant menu” will return many more. Eat up.
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
Good choice
ReplyDeleteFound a early version
https://www.urbanarchive.org/sites/SpjMbwfM7nW/QktPrer1Nv6
The Brill Brothers building? I feel history closing in!
ReplyDeleteI'm a senior citizen. Speaking of history, when the cheap restaurant I used to go to with my poor mother, the "Aristocrat," on Broadway in Vancouver, closed...Its replacement, a big box bookstore, kept the big sign displayed upstairs inside. The logo looks like the aristocrat on the peanuts can.
ReplyDeleteI always like seeing an old sign that went with a building’s earlier incarnation.
ReplyDelete