Hardware Stores

My Twitter muse (@coreykilgannon) has done it again. He's posted a photo of an Upper West Side hardware store that is going out of business after 120 years, one year after displaying a proud banner outside the store wishing themselves a Happy Anniversary, and telling anyone who can read that they've been there for 119 years.

Do you know who the president was 119/120 years ago?  William McKinley! Of course that would have been before he was assassinated in Buffalo in September 1901, thus giving us Theodore Roosevelt as president and the dawn of Teddy Bears on children's beds.

I'm probably as nostalgic about independent hardware stores and their disappearance as any male "of a certain age." I made a blog posting in 2017 about Warshaw, a Third Avenue hardware store that could still be counted on to find hanger bolts.

As a kid growing up in the Murray hill section of Flushing, my father took me on trips on many Saturdays to the B&D hardware store on Northern Boulevard, just west of 154th Street, two blocks from the house. We were generally buying batteries for the flashlight, getting a quart of benzene, —a solvent for ceiling paint—poured from a holding tank in the back, or a supply of nails plopped in a small brown paper bag, taken from tin tins and weighed. Eight penny nails weren't 8¢ cents a pound, but they were called 8d (penny) nails. The longer the nail, the more per pound they were.

My father also probably bought turpentine, poured into a quart container with a skull and cross bones label, to be used to clean paint brushes that applied oil based paint. There was no water-soluble latex paint then. It was oil and lead based, and the brush was fairly heavy once dipped into such paint.

The hardware store then was called B&D, and I never knew what the initials stood for. In the '50s it was owned by a German couple, Herzog. Eventually a neighbor across the street from us, Nelson, bought the store, then Rocco Tesco, who had the store until it closed sometime in the '90s, yielding the building to a Korean Karaoke place I think.

Rocco had the store for the longest time. He eventually expanded into the adjacent building, cutting a archway between the buildings, where his wife generally worked selling the household items, wallpaper, and blinds. The place was Sears Roebuck without a catalog.

Aside from missing Rocco, I miss the fact that you could buy a piece of custom cut single pane window glass there. For various reasons, we needed window panes, and we could always count on getting the fit at Tesco's.

Another hardware store in the neighborhood, Beplats' is still on Roosevelt and 150th Street, looking the same as when I was a kid. It is Asian owned these days, but you can still get cut glass there. There are no hardware stores I'm aware of near where I live in Nassau County that will cut glass for you. (I generally need it for making frames.)

I don't think there is anything that you could buy at a 1950s hardware store that you can't find at a Home Depot or Ace Hardware of today. There are of course waaaaaaay more items you can buy at the Ace Hardwares and Home Depots of today than you would ever think of finding in a hardware store back then.

Given an Ace Hardware (Costello's) of the size found nearby in Bellmore,  you can look at and consider gigantic multi-jet hot tubs! Tubs. As in more than one.

In my workshop I keep a New York City tax photo from 1940 of what the Flushing hardware store looked like then. The proprietor is Feldherr, and predates my father and mother buying the home nearby in 1946. There is an older women in front of the store, talking to someone who looks like a customer.

Typical of most hardware stores then, and now, items were placed on the sidewalk in front of the store. Next to Mrs. Feldherr you can spot the reel mower of the type my father bought there, or the one he inherited when buying the house.

Our property was 50' and 106' and had enough grass to mow in front and back that a mower was needed. Lots of Queens homes then, and now, have only a "beach blanket" patch of grass that could be mowed with a scissor, or now, a weed whacker.

I still have the mower in my backward, propped up as a museum piece next to a large McGuire bamboo rake. The mower's handle is secured to the shaft by a plate with the initial "PQ." When I rebuilt the wooden handle and the shaft I looked into it enough to find that "PQ" meant Pennsylvania Quality.

Did the New York State governor know that mowers from another state were being hawked at the local hardware store?

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