A slice of life in the 1940s, Brooklyn, New York


I have a particular fascination with ordinary life. I started looking at old photos of my favorite city, Phoenix, many years ago, and often my eye was drawn to the people, frozen in time, doing ordinary stuff. So I started calling it "slice of life". And today I'm in Brooklyn.

The reason I'm there has nothing to do with any knowledge of the place, it's because I found an image on the Duke University website, and it caught my eye. Their website, by the way, is dedicated to advertising, and that's why the image was preserved. Yes, there are scholarly people who look at old advertising. And sometimes the location and date are included with the information on the photo, and sometimes it's not. This time it wasn't, and figuring out exactly where it was taken was done by my top history adventurer, who has a special knack for doing that. Let's time-travel. We're going to 13th Avenue and 41st Street in the 1940s.

Now calm down already if you're asking if this was a historically-significant corner, or if some celebrity is in the photo. No, and no. And yes, I understand that's what most people are interested in, but not me, I just want to see the ordinary people, who are extraordinary to me. That's the slice of life.


The first thing that I noticed in this particular slice of life is that it's mostly women and children. Since I don't have an exact date for it, I'm not sure if it was during WWII, when so many men were in the service, so it just might be that women tended to do the shopping, and still do, especially for hosiery, lingerie, and children's wear, which is what Sylvann's Shop sold.



The kid in the foreground (8, 9, 10 years old?) is wearing a baseball cap, which would be seen on kids nowadays, but his trousers and long-sleeved shirt seem out of place on such a young man. To his credit, he has his shirt untucked, which is the fashion nowadays, but my best guess is that he were to be confronted by an adult, they'd make him tuck it back in, like the guy there leaning against the building.


I don't recall seeing a traffic light in my lifetime that didn't have a yellow in the middle, but I guess I'm just too young. How did people back in those days know that the light was about to change to red, and to "gun it"? It's nice to see a handy trash can, although it doesn't look like everyone really knew how to use it then. By the way, I see a woman on a bicycle, which is great, and it looks like she has a carrier on the back. I wonder if she's going to the Big Apple? I can't quite read the name, but I'd guess that's what she would have called it. And it looks like if you didn't find what you were looking for in one store, you only need to go a few steps to the next store. I live in suburban Phoenix, which is so spread out that most people drive from store to store, even if it's in the same parking lot.

And here's what makes this so much fun, finding the exact location on Google Street View. Yep, that's the same building, and it looks like the buildings in the background on the left are the same, too.

Thank you for visiting Brooklyn in the 1940s with me!



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