I was walking along 8th Street in Manhattan with my nephew when we came up on a large black and white poster — a blow up of an old photo of 8th Street from long ago.<\/p>\n
On the right near corner was a Nedicks, and on the left was a Whelan’s Drugs. Those who know their NYC history will realize that this was the view of 8th Street looking East from 6th Avenue. The Nedick’s was where a Barnes & Nobles stood until recently, and Whelan’s was on the site of the recently closed Gray’s Papaya.<\/p>\n
Seeing the old cars and the horse drawn delivery wagon in the foreground, I wondered aloud when the photo was taken. Surely, I said, there must be a clue somewhere in the picture.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, half a block to the East was the movie theatre that eventually became the beloved 8th Street Playhouse. On the marquis was advertised Ann Harding in “Nine Girls”. I jotted that down.<\/p>\n
Later I looked it up on Google. The name of the film pegged the photo to 1944 (when the movie theater was still known as the Film Guild Cinema). I then ended up spending quite a lot of time on-line, learning about Ann Harding’s fascinating career and times. It was like entering a time machine.<\/p>\n
Nobody I’ve spoken to remembers her, except for one woman I’m guessing is around eighty years old, whom I met the other day at the Outer Critics’ Circle Awards. She remembers Ann Harding fondly from her childhood.<\/p>\n
Maybe, seventy years from now, somebody will see a forgotten name on a marquee in an old photo from 2014. And perhaps they too will enter a time machine. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was walking along 8th Street in Manhattan with my nephew when we came up on a large black and white poster — a blow up of an old photo of 8th Street from long ago. On the right near corner was a Nedicks, and on the left was a Whelan’s Drugs. Those who know … Continue reading “Eighth Street time machine”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14795"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}