Fifth Avenue is in almost constant flux. Even above Ninth Street things are beginning to change. There’s a new Washington Mutual Bank up there and a national chain drug store on the corner of Ninth and Fifth Avenue (RIte Aid, CVS, who can tell the difference?)
A few of the discount stores, those places that sell a cacophonous assortment of merchandise from paper towels to plus-size clothing, lava lamps and lunch boxes, have big CLEARANCE or GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SIGNS plastered across their windows.
It could be a sign of the times: real estate prices are forcing them out. Or it could just be a ruse: a way to move the merchandise faster.
Payless, that shoe fetishist’s paradise between 10th and 11th Streets, always pulls me in. They’ve got mystery-material knock-offs of the latest in adult and children’s footwear. You want Uggs, they’ve got them. Sort of. You want floral printed Wellington boots: they’ve got it. Merrills? Something close. Pointy Prada-esque shoes. Not a problem.
Don’t tell anyone, but I got my knee-high "leather" boots there for $14.99. I don’t think they look cheap. Or do they?
And who can forget Save on Fifth, that emporium of everything you need and all the things you didn’t even know you needed. But you do. You really do. It’s almost impossible to resist the lures of that easy-to-shop-in, inexpensive alternative to Seventh Avenue?
If you ask me, Fifth Avenue should stop changing NOW. The combination of the old and the new is in almost perfect alignment. I want it to stop before it becomes something else again.
There’s still the ices cart on 10th Street and the lady who sells roasted peanuts. The Spanish bakery with the hyperactive cafe con leche. Western Beef butchers, that old boy’s club of a meatery. The Italian pork sausage shop. The strange parking lot on First Street with the Porsche on the garage roof (someone wants to turn that corner into a drive-thru bank. STOP). That weirder than weird lingerie shop run by the big lady and her dog. It’s all still there next to the nouveau: Lulus, Dianne Kane, Serene Rose, Stone Park Cafe, Blue Ribbon, Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store and the Park Slope Chip Shop.
If we lose the old stuff, we forfeit the whole feeling of the place, what made it interesting to begin with.
Yours from Brooklyn,
OTBKB