A Cortelyou Rd Street Scene

“While I’m getting my carriage repaired I’m going to take my laundry over to Ditmas Churchill’s and then go to Jimmy’s for lunch.” — These could have been your Sunday Cortelyou Road plans back in the 1940s!

Last night I got f*ckeddd up and did what I’m pretty sure everyone in NYC does in that situation on a Saturday night: got online from my computer with the big monitor to look at the NYC Municipal Archive’s photos of 1940s New York, which were taken for tax purposes. The tax photos are always fascinating but sometimes mundane, since the purpose was simply to document the buildings and not the people and things around them. So when you do see the occasional milk truck, shop-owner, or horse on your Saturday night browse through the collection, it’s pretty exciting.

This sequence from Cortelyou Road between Coney Island Ave and Stratford Rd might be my favorite from all of the photos they took of Flatbush businesses that I’ve pawed through so far. The little girl who appears in two of them would be in her 70s now, I wonder where she lives.