Someone call CNN. This is a momentous occasion.
The grocery store at 25th St. and 4th Ave., two blocks from my house, has at long last reopened!
My friends might remember this store, only slightly larger than a normal bodega and affectionately called "The National." It smelled funny and had rotting produce, but it was a place where I could purchase frozen pizza and yogurt and bread. It closed down for renovation eons ago, leaving me with no option but to survive on gathered dandelions growing in the sidewalk.
Or, okay, more realistically, I've been subsisting on cans of refried beans from the corner store. Mmm....
But now it's magically transformed into a sparkling new (if still tiny) C-Town (town town)! I went there last night and honestly could not stop smiling. Oh, what a few months of deprivation in Brooklyn will do to you. Perhaps best of all, the management has retained most of the workers from The National. I have never been so pleased to see anyone in my life! I look forward to more transactions where I feel like a moron because I do not speak Spanish and you smile at me indulgently yet impatiently.
Hooray!
(Pulitzer Prize–winning photos of The National then and C-Town now taken by me.)
.
The grocery store at 25th St. and 4th Ave., two blocks from my house, has at long last reopened!
My friends might remember this store, only slightly larger than a normal bodega and affectionately called "The National." It smelled funny and had rotting produce, but it was a place where I could purchase frozen pizza and yogurt and bread. It closed down for renovation eons ago, leaving me with no option but to survive on gathered dandelions growing in the sidewalk.
Or, okay, more realistically, I've been subsisting on cans of refried beans from the corner store. Mmm....
But now it's magically transformed into a sparkling new (if still tiny) C-Town (town town)! I went there last night and honestly could not stop smiling. Oh, what a few months of deprivation in Brooklyn will do to you. Perhaps best of all, the management has retained most of the workers from The National. I have never been so pleased to see anyone in my life! I look forward to more transactions where I feel like a moron because I do not speak Spanish and you smile at me indulgently yet impatiently.
Hooray!
(Pulitzer Prize–winning photos of The National then and C-Town now taken by me.)
.
7 comments:
I'm totally psyched.
Oh happy day! I know how deprived you have been.
I forgot to mention that this same phenomenon happened to me when I moved to East Cambridge. Soon after I moved in, the local Shaw's supermarket closed down for renovation for several long, cold, schlepping-groceries-on-the-bus months.
Moral: Do not let me move near where you live. The local amenities will instantly shutter.
My C-Town blows. I bought gray bananas there the other day. Gray, I tells ya.
Gray bananas are better than no bananas.
I can't believe the sign only has two "Towns"! But, yay! But oh, that Shaw's was soooo glorious.
So I finally went, and it's a real grocery store, albeit a tiny, tiny one. Their produce kind of sucks, but it's a block from Rossman's, and everything else looked pretty good. Last night was about the 4th time I've been grocery shopping since I moved in October.
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