Chock full o’Nuts

Time travel is not that difficult: browse a 1940 Manhattan telephone directory, then browse the 1939–1941 Manhattan tax photographs.

There are nineteen Chock full o’Nuts outlets listed in the 1940 directory. Many are not to be seen in the tax photographs. Some appear in photographs that aren’t especially helpful to the discriminating traveler. These two photographs are the best I could find.

[976 6th Avenue, at 36th Street. Click for a larger view.]

The building still stands, with a Taco Bell at street level. Those pedestrians are no doubt headed to Chock full for lunch.

[38 East 23rd Street, between Broadway and Park Avenue. Click for a larger view.]

This building, too, still stands, just down the block from the Flatiron Building. At street level today: Bambu, serving Vietnamese coffee, dessert drinks, tea, juice, and smoothies.

Those hatted men must be waiting on line for a seat. Take a look at this 1955 interior.

Related reading
All OCA Chock full o’Nuts posts (Pinboard)

Block that metaphor

Andrew Yang:

“The question is: How can we bring the temperature of the country down? And I want to be the metaphorical wet blanket for the country.”

Merriam-Webster: “one that quenches or dampens enthusiasm or pleasure.”

Synonyms: drag, grinch, killjoy, party pooper, spoilsport.

In high school, we called such a person a bringdown. Aw man, don’t be a bringdown!

Perhaps Andrew Yang is harking back to nineteenth-century hydrotherapy and the practice of “wet-sheet packing.” In which case, again: block that metaphor. The doctor is out!

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, has many delightful clues and answers. But it is on the easy side. 1-D, four letters, “Name from Old Norse for ‘grandfather’”: I could guess at that. And then I looked at 19-A, three letters, “Muskrat habitat” and saw that I must have 1-A right. And so it went, mostly. This was another puzzle in which the southwest corner was a struggle, thanks to 33-D, eight letters, “4 Yards More sporting goods.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-A, ten letters, “Excessively angled.” Aha.

11-D, five letters, “Numbers put together.” I thought the answer must be about math.

15-A, ten letters, “Modern civil rights phrase.” Good to see this sentiment (a sentence, not a phrase) in a puzzle.

34-D, eight letters, “Coffee creamer flavor.” I would never use the stuff. But my friend Aldo liked the original. That’s why the answer came to me.

38-D, eight letters, “Hot tuna roll ingredient.” I’m glad I already knew how to spell it.

45-D, six letters, “Formal disclosure.” I thought it must be a term from the law.

51-A, three letters, “Letters in Prof. Higgins’ notebook.” Very clever.

62-A, four letters, “Walk-on part.” CAMEO doesn’t fit.

A clue whose answer I understood only after looking it up: 43-D, three letters, “Group kept in banks.”

And my favorite in this puzzle: 35-D, eight letters, “Poppy?”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Less than, fewer than

Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News tonight:

“. . . less than [?] jobs added, far fewer than expected . . .”

I wasn’t fast enough to get the number (200,000?), but you get the idea. I can imagine a writer wondering, “Should it be less than? Fewer than? I know: I’ll try both!”

But there’s nothing wrong with repeating fewer here.

Feel Flows

Having made my way through the 5-CD Beach Boys compilation Feel Flows: The “Sunflower” and “Surf’s Up” Sessions, I ask myself, as I have before: was there ever a group that so veered between the great and the awful? Yes, the Beatles had clunkers now and then (“What Goes On” immediately comes to mind), but the Beach Boys — oh my.

This compilation alone includes “A Day in the Life of a Tree” (sung by a tree), “My Solution” (a mad scientist story), “Student Demonstration Time” (Mike Love’s rewriting of “Riot in Cell Block 9,” with lyrics that equate protest with rioting), “Susie Cincinnati” (she’s the city’s “number-one sinner,” a cab-driver/groupie, it seems), and “Take a Load Off Your Feet” (yes, foot care, with references to avocado cream, broken glass, and sandals). Yikes.

But then I hear the back-to-back album tracks “’Til I Die” and “Surf’s Up,” or the trippy “Feel Flows,” or the staggeringly good live versions of “This Whole World” and “Disney Girls (1957)” or almost any of the isolated background-vocal tracks in this compilation (for instance), and I’m undone. Even “Take a Load Off Your Feet” in a 1993 concert performance is weirdly glorious — and it puts to shame the current assemblage performing under the Beach Boys’ name. I recommend Feel Flows to any fanatic who doesn’t already have it.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

[After a partial rendition of “Nighthawks at the Diner.”]

“So do you like my Tom Waits imitation?”

“It affects me physically.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Marie Wilcox (1933–2021)

Language rescuer and lexicographer. The New York Times has an obituary.

A mobile phone

From Harriet Craig (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1950). Harriet (Joan Crawford) to her husband Walter (Wendell Corey):

“Walter, maybe you’d better not call me. Heaven knows where I’ll be from minute to minute. But I can always reach you. And if you’re not at home or the office, you will leave word where you are, won’t you?”

“I’ll carry a phone around with me.”

He could never have imagined.

Mater

Mater, by Jason Long: “a simple and purty menu bar Pomodoro app” (free) for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Perhaps too simple for some users, just twenty-five minutes, then five, with no other settings and no pausing. (I’d prefer a three-minute break.)

But I like the box in the menu bar, looking like a calendar page or scale: to my mind, it’s a better choice than a display that shows time running down by the second.

Three related posts
The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated : Flow : Pomotroid

A Hamilton House postcard

[Linen texture, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. From Digital Commonwealth: Massachusetts Collections Online. Click either image for a larger view.]

The text accompanying the postcard says “c. 1930–1945.” But we know from this tax photograph of 10031 4th Avenue that the Hamilton House could not have been at this location before 1939.

Thanks to an indefatigible librarian for finding this postcard.

Related posts
Green beans and the Hamilton House : Hamilton House cheesecake