I miss plenty of long-gone places: bookstores (Gotham Book Mart, Scribner’s), shops (Altman’s, Fiorucci’s), restaurants (the great Paolini’s in Bryn Mawr).
But I was thinking last night of places my mother had told me about, from the 1930s, when she was a teenager. The fabled used-book shop Leary’s in Philadelphia. She would visit her father at his business, then head over to Leary’s to browse: Mom was a real book-hound, and she loved that place ( still have a few of her books with Leary’s stickers on them).
Less well-known was Betty’s ice-cream parlor in Upper Darby. Mom would go there after school with her best friend, Shirley Katz. She said when you ordered an ice-cream sundae, you would be served the ice cream with a small, separate silver pitcher of hot fudge!
Pretty soon there will be no one left alive who remembers Leary’s and Betty’s first-hand . . .