Blatt’s 4 - 8 & 19¢ Store

[Blatt’s 4 - 8 & 19¢ Store, 5005 13th Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Clicking my way down 13th Avenue in 1940s.nyc, I stopped in front of Blatt’s. The name drew my eye. A five-and-dime? No way! Four cents! Eight cents! Bargains indeed. I also like the traces of snow and what looks to me like wintry light. And oh — there’s a baby carriage parked in front.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle has a story from 1925 about an attempted safecracking at a Blatt’s Department Store in Williamsburg. The same Blatt? I have no idea. I found a handful of advertisements for the Boro Park Blatt’s that clearly establish mid-century prices rising well above the 19¢ mark.

[Brooklyn Daily, September 25, 1956; September 19, 1962; September 21, 1962. Click any advertisement for a larger view and bigger savings.]

On October 16, 1962, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported a four-alarm fire at the store. Nineteen firefighters suffered smoke inhalation. After that, I can find no sign of Blatt’s in business. Today 5005 13th Avenue, severely reduced in size, houses a jewelry showroom.

I was about to give up on finding out more about Blatt’s when I thought I’d check The New York Times. Perhaps there was a story about the fire? No soap. But I did find something of interest, a December 29, 1974 article, “Blatt Brothers Hold the Price Line — Almost.” Holy smokes: Dean, Jerry, and Sandy Blatt, sons of William and Frances Blatt of the 4 - 8 & 19¢ Store, opened a 69¢ Shop on Lexington Avenue in 1959. Four more 69¢ Shops followed, along with a $1.69 Shop. I’d think of those stores as the forerunners of today’s dollar stores.

[“Blatt Brothers Hold the Price Line — Almost.” The New York Times, December 29, 1974.]

Deep nostalgia: On the drive from New Jersey to visit maternal grandparents in Brooklyn, when nearing the Brooklyn Bridge, we passed the 69¢ Shop at 89 Chambers Street countless times. On Saturdays and Sundays, the store was closed; the area, a ghost town. The store always seemed like a place of great wonders. It probably wasn’t.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

[Advertisements via Brooklyn Newsstand.]

An IRS pipeline

In The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell visits an IRS outpost:

I recently took a (chaperoned) tour of the Pipeline, which is usually off-limits to journalists. Imagine Willy Wonka’s secretive chocolate factory, but instead of gumdrops and lollipops it’s . . . paper. Everywhere, paper.

Also Tingle tables and Windows XP.

Readers of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, take note. Taxpayers, take note.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell, and it’s full of Stump. A half-hour’s worth for me. Phew.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, five letters, “You might get one at City Hall.” Could that be right? I’ll try it. Yes, it’s right.

4-D, eight letters, “John Muir’s ‘magic wand in Nature's hand.’” Beautiful.

17-A, ten letters, “Mold-made French dessert with milk and almonds.” Thank you, James Joyce’s Dubliners.

28-A, five letters, “Hair Buster Gel brand.” Perhaps a giveaway, but it fooled me.

25-D, six letters, “Grafted plant with red and white edibles.” O brave new world, / That has such plant life in’t.

35-D, eight letters, “Turned the page?” Clever.

38-D, eight letters, “Father of fairy tales.” Heh.

49-A, seven letters, “Math’s ‘unifying thread.’” I’ll take your word for it.

56-D, three letters, “View preamble.” PRE? PUR? Help.

57-D, three letters, “Exciting or excellent, these days.” And sometimes repurposed for comic effect.

62-A, ten letters, “Professor’s preservative.” Made me laugh.

But my favorite in this puzzle: 31-A, eight letters, “Peacock’s display.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

In search of lost art supplies

[“Trash Talk.” Zippy, August 13, 2022. Click for a larger view.]

The panels that follow in today’s Zippy reference Speedball nibs, kneaded erasers, Cartoon Colour Cel-Vinyl White-Out, and a cleaning solution for pen points.

I hope Bill Griffith knows about the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies.

Orange Crate Art has its own modest Museum of Supplies. The most recent exhibit is here: Executive Ko-Rec-Type Typewriter Correction Film.

Related reading
All OCA Museum of Supplies posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

The ten-second balance test

“This simple, often neglected skill can pay huge dividends later in life”: the ten-second balance test (The New York Times ).

Attachment B

[Click for a larger view.]

In the immortal (tweeted, unpunctuated) words of Donald Trump Jr., “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Here’s the warrant and inventory. Section d. of Attachment B suggests that they’re looking for evidence of obstruction of justice.

Recently updated

Along came Mary, and a bookstore Now with more about the Liveright Bookshop and the Liveright sisters.

HCR, August 11

The August 11 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American puts yesterday’s news in one place.

Like Mueller, She Wrote, Richardon suspects a Saudi connection:

What springs to mind for me is the plan pushed by Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and fundraiser and campaign advisor Tom Barrack, to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. In 2019, whistleblowers from the National Security Council worried that their efforts might have broken the law and that the effort to make the transfer was ongoing. The plan was to enable Saudi leaders to build nuclear power plants, a plan that would have yielded billions of dollars to the investors but would have allowed Saudi Arabia to build nuclear weapons.

If the defeated former president has no objection to unsealing the warrant and inventory for the search of his property (documents which he himself could have made available days ago), I can imagine three possible follow-ups. He might claim that evidence was planted. Or that a coffee-boy put something in a box without his knowledge. A heavily redacted inventory might allow him to claim that the Justice Department in fact has nothing on him. In 1930s movie-speak: “They’re tryin’a frame me, I tell ya!” Or: “You ain’t got nothin’ on me, see?”

*

One more possible move: he might claim that he declassified materials in his head, or by telling someone that he had declassified them.


*

My last guess seems to have been right. The defeated former president, forty-eight minutes ago on his faux-Twitter: “It was all declassified.”

*

As The New York Times points out, even if it were declassified, that wouldn’t matter.

Dusk, dusk, “Dusk”

It occurred to me last night, around dusk, that dusk is a beautiful word. Where is it from? That’s uncertain. From Etymonline:

“partial darkness, state between light and darkness, twilight,” 1620s, from an earlier adjective dusk, from Middle English dosc (c. 1200) “obscure, not bright; tending to darkness, shadowy,” having more to do with color than light, which is of uncertain origin, not found in Old English. Middle English also had it as a verb, dusken “to become dark.” The Middle English noun was dusknesse “darkness” (late 14c.).

Perhaps it is from a Northumbrian variant of Old English dox “dark-haired, dark from the absence of light,” with transposition of -k- and -s- (compare colloquial ax for ask). But OED notes that “few of our words in -sk are of OE origin.” Old English dox is from PIE [Proto-Indo-European] *dus-ko- “dark-colored” (source also of Swedish duska “be misty,” Latin fuscus “dark,” Sanskrit dhusarah “dust-colored”; also compare Old English dosan “chestnut-brown,” Old Saxon dosan, Old High German tusin “pale yellow”).

“Dusk” is the title of a great 1940 Duke Ellington recording. Solos by Rex Stewart (cornet) and Lawrence Brown (trombone).

[The asterisk: “Words beginning with an asterisk are not attested in any written source.”]

Worse than I imagined, I think

From The Washington Post:

Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Experts in classified information said the unusual search underscores deep concern among government officials about the types of information they thought could be located at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and potentially in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

Mueller, She Wrote (Allison Gill) has a thread that suggests a Trump–Saudi connection.

[I’m not sure what I imagined, but I think “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons” is worse. The “gift” link I first posted no longer goes to the right article, so I’ve replaced it with an ordinary link.]