# Nostalgia for places I have never seen

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nostalgia-for-places-i-have-never-seen/609912>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [January 18, 2012, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nostalgia-for-places-i-have-never-seen/609912 "2012-01-18T17:16:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Eve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Eve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eve)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2012, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nostalgia-for-places-i-have-never-seen/609912/1 "2012-01-18T17:16:48Z")

</div>

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 . . .