The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued

Page 241

Five and Tens

Especially between 23rd and 24th Streets on Broadway, the streets of Bayway Town’s shopping district were lined with shop windows, offering glimpses of fashionable goods for sale from around the world. Swaths of textiles, crates of ceramics, parlor suites, elaborate silver services, and dressed mannequins on display were models of style that customers aspired to copy in their own homes. Now work done and flush with the “inside dope,” Sam took it on the arches there, to the place which hadn’t changed since he was a kid, to luxuriously bask in the joyous, outside information of the everyday shoppers.

In the most egalitarian of natural, un-mandated ways, thereby contrasting the sumptuousness, the practicality and fun of Kresge’s, the FW Woolworth Co., and Grant’s were also located there. The three were five and dimes, and all three chose to be right there, on that same block, on the same side of the street; Paramount’s side; one at each corner and the FW Woolworth Co. at the center. Sam entered Woolworth’s and went directly to the lunch counter in the back on the west side. It was a long walk as the store penetrated deeply into the block, its length eclipsing its width.