White shoes, no stores

[709 Broadway, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

How I got here: This past Tuesday’s Zippy featured a 1950s streetscape with a storefront: Tom Dick and Harry Shoes.

In 1929 an advertisment for Tom, Dick, and Harry Shoes (“made in our own factories”) appeared in The Brooklyn Eagle, with seven Brooklyn locations listed. A shoe business with more or less the same name, Tom Dick & Harry, aka Tom Dee’s, “estd. 1940,” is still going, even if its website is defunct and its Facebook page and blog haven’t been updated in years. The Facebook page and blog list two locations, in Brooklyn and Harlem. Here’s the Brooklyn store, at 709 Broadway. And here’s the Harlem store, at 1934 Third Avenue.

When I saw the tax photographs for nos. 709 and 1934, I was disappointed not to see a shoestore. The 1940 Manhattan telephone directory lists 640 Broadway as Tom, Dick, and Harry’s Manhattan address. But there’s no shoe store in that address’s tax photograph (though there is a Harry Rothman, whose windows suggest a men’s clothing store). At some point Tom, Dick, and Harry must have been on the move.

Also on the move: the pedestrians in front of no. 709. Those shoes must have come from some white-shoe firm. Was it Easter Sunday? Some other special occasion? The shoes are not talking.

[Click for a larger view.]

As I discovered only after writing all of the above, a photograph by Todd Webb is the source of the Zippy scene: Tom Dick and Harry Shoes also appears in a 2018 Zippy strip that cites as its source a 1946 Webb photograph of a shoe store on a Third Avenue corner. If I can find that corner in a tax photograph, you can be sure that I’ll post it.

*

Here it is. Thanks, Brian.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)