This week’s neighbourhood wins the ‘most contrasting content’ award. From the derivation of ‘my neck of the woods’ to butt plugs. You also reminded me of the horrors of walking through department stores’ perfume sections. Anosmia is a gift.
Enjoyable as always but, and pardon me, I’m just here to comment that it’s refreshing to read that Spencer’s gifts still alive and well in the US (so much else has changed since I moved abroad).
It was even around in the 80s (I graduated high school in ‘90 and remember that store in the mall(s) my HS friends and I frequented — and I remember the “adult” area I skirted by, wondering what was there but afraid to investigate 😊)!
This is my childhood neighborhood! If you ever come back on your journeys, stop by Ginos for some of the best pizza in the boros followed by tiki drinks from Jade Garden.
That sounds like a much better culinary itinerary than Kong Dog and the exotic vending machine! I went to Holy Schnitzel years ago and remember liking it. Have you ever been?
Holy Schnitzel is great! They're a Kosher minichain that also has locations in LI and NJ if I remember correctly. They ironically occupy the former site of a pork store. One of the schnitzel baguettes from there can easily feed a family of three w/ leftovers.
Enjoyed this, as always, and thanks for the End sign. Out of all your posts, and some adventures did verge on being very dangerous, it seems you were scared most of all with the mall 😅 But enjoyed your way with words - cloying miasma and olfactory gauntlet 😂
I like how grumpy you get just as soon as you enter the mall. Usually you maintain a pretty good neutral, observational tone with only a few snide asides regarding Maestro Moses.
My Great-Grandfather George Borgstede had a truck farm around the corner from the Decker's where the Staten Island Mall is now. We always joked that my Mom was born on a farm in New York City because she would have been with my Grandmother at the farm shortly after she was born (in a hospital in 1935). In one of my more memorable days, I found the farm on an insurance map in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. Then I rode my bike over. There seems to be some wooded land up from the mall that may have been part of the farm. I need to go back and check it out.
In this week's Meatpacking edition of The Neighborhoods you had a photo of Gansevoort Market in 1907. I like to think that my GG is one of those farmers with his wagon full of produce.
Amazing! I see that that the SI Historical society has one of his old cultivators.Have you seen it? It's always interesting when consecutive neighborhoods have a common thread like the truck farm/farmers market connection these past two weeks.
Why did the beginning of the recording where you entered the mall make the hair on the back of my neck stand up? The world may never know, but it for sure did.
I should look into the Decker farm. My mom (and, I suppose, I) is related to Deckers who farmed throughout Pennsylvania and Ohio. They're where my family gets its debilitating genetic disorder, CADASIL. (Gotta have a full life cuz it's gonna be a short one.). I wonder if they're the same Deckers.
If only you could record smells! The Deckers were a prominent Staten Island family. Would be surprised if there wasn’t a connection. CADASIL is no joke. Hope you have managed to avoid it.
I can’t stop wondering why the folks who decorated their garage with “merry Christmas” wouldn’t just move the word Christmas up or down a bit so it didn’t overlap with the knob. They were so close!
Some of us don’t have that kind of elite executive functioning. This is exactly the kind of thing I would do if I happened to have a garage and the desire to adorn it with cheerful messages.
“While I’m sure there are people who would be thrilled to find an Eye of the Spawn Vibrating & Squirming Silicone Butt Plug With Remote under the tree” your mother-in-law, for one!
Oh man, if anyone ever pines away for “old” New York I tell them, “Go to Staten Island.”.
For example, your description of The Mall entering from the stinky Macy’s side (stinkier outside during landfill times (especially during the summer)) and ending at back of Spencer’s with the butt plugs is par for the course going back 30 something years. SI is an enigma wrapped in a time warp :).
New Springville's charms have always escaped me. Not sure if it's the tacky homes, the traffic, the dump smell, or the long schlep to the SI Mall on the old R4 bus, but I was never a fan. Many scenes from "Easy Money" (the most Staten Island film ever) were filmed in New Springville. The wedding in the back yard, with Rodney Dangerfield and 200 guests crammed onto a few dozen square feet of grass, is a hysterical counterpart to the much classier "Godfather" wedding, also filmed on the Island. Dorothy Valentine Smith's "Staten Island, Gateway to New York" is a must read for any fledging Island historian. I check it out of my local library at least once a year whenever I feel wistful about my old hometown.
This week’s neighbourhood wins the ‘most contrasting content’ award. From the derivation of ‘my neck of the woods’ to butt plugs. You also reminded me of the horrors of walking through department stores’ perfume sections. Anosmia is a gift.
Yeah, I didn’t realize how much anatomy I covered, or at least how wide a spread…That anosmia would serve you equally well in the food court.
Enjoyable as always but, and pardon me, I’m just here to comment that it’s refreshing to read that Spencer’s gifts still alive and well in the US (so much else has changed since I moved abroad).
I had never been to a Spencer”s before but it absolutely felt like the kind of place you would visit in the mall in the 90s.
It was even around in the 80s (I graduated high school in ‘90 and remember that store in the mall(s) my HS friends and I frequented — and I remember the “adult” area I skirted by, wondering what was there but afraid to investigate 😊)!
Time to invest in a novelty store franchise!
This is my childhood neighborhood! If you ever come back on your journeys, stop by Ginos for some of the best pizza in the boros followed by tiki drinks from Jade Garden.
That sounds like a much better culinary itinerary than Kong Dog and the exotic vending machine! I went to Holy Schnitzel years ago and remember liking it. Have you ever been?
Holy Schnitzel is great! They're a Kosher minichain that also has locations in LI and NJ if I remember correctly. They ironically occupy the former site of a pork store. One of the schnitzel baguettes from there can easily feed a family of three w/ leftovers.
Enjoyed this, as always, and thanks for the End sign. Out of all your posts, and some adventures did verge on being very dangerous, it seems you were scared most of all with the mall 😅 But enjoyed your way with words - cloying miasma and olfactory gauntlet 😂
There is no place more terrifying than a mall.
😅😂
I like how grumpy you get just as soon as you enter the mall. Usually you maintain a pretty good neutral, observational tone with only a few snide asides regarding Maestro Moses.
Malls are soul crushing.
My Great-Grandfather George Borgstede had a truck farm around the corner from the Decker's where the Staten Island Mall is now. We always joked that my Mom was born on a farm in New York City because she would have been with my Grandmother at the farm shortly after she was born (in a hospital in 1935). In one of my more memorable days, I found the farm on an insurance map in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. Then I rode my bike over. There seems to be some wooded land up from the mall that may have been part of the farm. I need to go back and check it out.
In this week's Meatpacking edition of The Neighborhoods you had a photo of Gansevoort Market in 1907. I like to think that my GG is one of those farmers with his wagon full of produce.
Amazing! I see that that the SI Historical society has one of his old cultivators.Have you seen it? It's always interesting when consecutive neighborhoods have a common thread like the truck farm/farmers market connection these past two weeks.
Why did the beginning of the recording where you entered the mall make the hair on the back of my neck stand up? The world may never know, but it for sure did.
I should look into the Decker farm. My mom (and, I suppose, I) is related to Deckers who farmed throughout Pennsylvania and Ohio. They're where my family gets its debilitating genetic disorder, CADASIL. (Gotta have a full life cuz it's gonna be a short one.). I wonder if they're the same Deckers.
If only you could record smells! The Deckers were a prominent Staten Island family. Would be surprised if there wasn’t a connection. CADASIL is no joke. Hope you have managed to avoid it.
I can’t stop wondering why the folks who decorated their garage with “merry Christmas” wouldn’t just move the word Christmas up or down a bit so it didn’t overlap with the knob. They were so close!
Some of us don’t have that kind of elite executive functioning. This is exactly the kind of thing I would do if I happened to have a garage and the desire to adorn it with cheerful messages.
Fabulous as always! Thanks Rob
Thanks Gaye!
Did you try the Cinnabon?
I was more tempted by the churro Kong dog.
“While I’m sure there are people who would be thrilled to find an Eye of the Spawn Vibrating & Squirming Silicone Butt Plug With Remote under the tree” your mother-in-law, for one!
She reads this!
Yes I considered that after I posted and then I laughed and laughed.
More mall coverage please!
Never again!
I might go just to do a story about those old dudes lounging about in the massage chairs.
Oh, Anne. Please do!
Bring quarters.
That front yard!
Thanks for the tour.
Thanks for reading along!
Oh man, if anyone ever pines away for “old” New York I tell them, “Go to Staten Island.”.
For example, your description of The Mall entering from the stinky Macy’s side (stinkier outside during landfill times (especially during the summer)) and ending at back of Spencer’s with the butt plugs is par for the course going back 30 something years. SI is an enigma wrapped in a time warp :).
An enigma wrapped in a time warp is the perfect description!
New Springville's charms have always escaped me. Not sure if it's the tacky homes, the traffic, the dump smell, or the long schlep to the SI Mall on the old R4 bus, but I was never a fan. Many scenes from "Easy Money" (the most Staten Island film ever) were filmed in New Springville. The wedding in the back yard, with Rodney Dangerfield and 200 guests crammed onto a few dozen square feet of grass, is a hysterical counterpart to the much classier "Godfather" wedding, also filmed on the Island. Dorothy Valentine Smith's "Staten Island, Gateway to New York" is a must read for any fledging Island historian. I check it out of my local library at least once a year whenever I feel wistful about my old hometown.