Nice Photo at Samaria Pizza

It’s a photo of the strip mall that today includes Samaria Pizza, long before it was called Samaria. I spotted this tonight at Samaria, where the person behind the counter said he bought this print off eBay a couple of months ago. I mean how couldn’t he, right? What are the chances of finding a photo like this of the very place where you work? I never knew until now that the place far left, which is today a Verizon store, née Radio Shack, née White Castle, used to be a KFC, and with the classic minaret style roof; or that there ever was a Fish & Chips place. Today I think that’s a Subway Sandwich place. The pizza place in the picture is today Samaria, but I can’t tell what it was called back then. The Carvel sign looks like it is crying. I should have told the guy at the pizza place to look for 80s.NYC, if he hasn’t seen it already. The Bel Aire Diner would be to the left, outside the frame. What is today a Rite-Aid would have been to the right, but in the early 1970s I don’t know if the post office was there or if it was at the corner of Crescent and Broadway, in the place that is now a senior center. On that building you can still see palimpsest-like extrusions where the post office signage used to be. Wait, can palimpsest be used in reference to extrusions? Hey, why not.

I looked for this spot on 80s.NYC and found this too-grainy-to-be-useful photo, which does nothing to clarify if Samaria’s was called Samaria’s in the 1980s. It did reveal a giant yellow canopy of some sort of which I have a foggy memory. Was it a photomat? And the store on the far left does not look like the KFC seen in the other photo, nor does it look like the White Castle it was when I moved here. Like the above photo this one shows PS 126 in the back, and also the Catherine Sheridan Houses in the back toward the right. The Associated Supermarket is today the City Fresh Market.