Story idea: There should be a registry of what businesses occupied buildings and addresses in the past. The data is all out there but it’s too chaotic for something so specific as this. It could help get to the bottom of an individual location and which businesses preceded it but most of the Department of Buildings records only record the business name, which is frequently not the name of the establishment that occupies a given stret address. I think there is a lot of currency to this idea. It would help settle a lot of bar bets and fill in oceans of extremely local history. But could it be done?
Thinking of this earlier when I passed my former regular bar, about a block away from where I live. As with any place that could have been called my regular bar I remembered how an inevitable topic of conversation was What Do You Know About This Place? It was a point of honor to know that the place was previously a Yugoslavian social club, and before that an Irish Bar. No one I know from there can remember the name of that irish Bar but some are happy to pass along the same anecdote: the bar was straight along the east wall, not like the place today with the horseshoe-shaped bar. People love these details, or at least take pride in knowing them.
I thought of this a couple of years ago at a housewarming party for this woman I used to know. A lot of millennials have moved in to Astoria, which is fine with me, but one rather distasteful quality shared by certain of these individuals is their penchant for passing themselves off as Instant Experts on the history of Astoria and Long Island City. Where does Astoria begin and end — geographically, that is, not philosophically or metaphysically. The question, formerly of no particular significance as anything more than a morbidly trivial discussion, suddenly was being asked as if it had never been asked before, as if it even mattered. The definition of Astoria and LIC has changed countless times over the generations, with no “official” boundaries save for the USPS zip code assignments, which often do but frequently do not accurately define a neighborhood or community.
Getting back to that housewarming: the woman was a millennial and so were a lot of her friends. One of them delivered a speech in which he declared that a bowling alley once existed where a place called The Strand now stood. That is not true. The bowling alley, which closed in the late 1990s, was in the basement of an address a few doors down from where The Strand is. Today that former bowling alley space is occupied by a recording studio. The space which is today occupied by The Strand had been a Blockbuster Video.
(That’s interesting how I said that a space “had been” something else, as if the space itself was crafted into something new by shuffling some atoms around.)
The millennial didn’t seem to appreciate the correction, which I can understand up to a point except that i did not mean to make to make him look like an idiot. An older guy in the room who had lived in the area about as long as I nodded in affirmation of my comments. He is the type who would never offer a correction to someone’s ignorance. He would just let it lie. And I do not use the term “ignorance” as a pejorative. Being ignorant siimply meand you don’t know something. Period. it doesn’t mean you are stupid or a dumbass, it just means that certain information is not known to you. The phenomenon of WILLFUL IGNORANCE is another matter. That is the real scourge of our society, but that’s a matter for another discussion.
Point being: peopel take pride in knowing these ultra-local bits of trivia, and there should be a resource that makes it possible to settle any debates that arise.
I think this could be taken to an even more granular level: Who lived in my apartment before me? I happen to know that a Japanese woman lived in my place for 2 years before moving back to Japan. Before that the landlord’s son lived there for 10-12 years. I only know this because the owner himself told me. Prior to that I have no idea, and know of no way to find out save for scanning pages of old Queens phone books and hoping for a miracle that I could convert the text of the pages to digital form and stuff all that shit into a database where I could reverse search against addresses.
But I really doubt that would work. Phone books of yore had addresses but did not reliably include apartment numbers. The data uis out there, though. Just creat an ancestry.com account and see for yourself. I looked up Lucy Miller the other night after our strange encounter on 33rd Street. The only record that came up was her street address with apartment number. That data exists and has probably been sliced and diced in the manner I describe, but it is not a simple task for Joe Q. Public to do anything with or to access that data.
I would like to host a reunion of everyone who has lived in my apartment. As random a gathering of humanity as one could imagine, I would think. We could talk about how the bathtub backs up, how the hot water doesn’t work well after noon, how noise from the upstairs neighbor was or was not annoying.
A bunch of years ago I received an email from a woman who had searched for her street address and found my web site, where I had posted several pictures from an apartment I lived at in upper Manhattan, on Broadway at 216th Street. She was writing to say that she thought she was presently living in my old apartment. We quickly concluded that she was living next door to my old pace, which was close enough for jazz and which kicked off a lengthy if sometimes puzzling correspondence. She was obviously hitting on me, which was fine, but she would disappear for months at a time then return, expecting the conversation to pick up where it left off.
Her premise for reaching out to me sounded like something I would do. In fact I think I might have done that once with regard to the Parc Lincoln. I don’t remember now if I contacted someone or if she contacted me but I had a back and forth with someone who lived at that shithole around the same time I did. That correspondence didn’t last long.
But all this proves my point, that people care and are interested in their building’s past, and in the past occupants of businesses they patronize.
A principal difficulty of a “Past Businesses Registry” is that adresses or more malleable than such a database would require. 5 buildings are torn down to make way for one new building, erasing 4 street addresses and, one assumes, any memory of their existence. Additionally, the names of places do not always appear in DOB records, only the name of the business that owns it. A bar could be called “Butthole’s Blathering Post” but that name might never appear in DOB records if the place was owned by “LMNOP Incorporated”. Cross-referencing other state-level records might reveal what establishments LMNOP Inc. owned but it seems like a very inexact stretch.
