The Last Old-School Seltzer Shop in New York

nytimes.com

38 points·mhb··8 comments

Boomer here, born in Southern California. I read lots of children’s books during the post World War II era.

I realize now that since Manhattan was the center of publishing, and because it was probably just convenient for the publishers, virtually all of these books were written by people in the New York area. These books featured lots of terms like brownstone, seltzer, corned beef hash, and egg cream, which took decades for me to understand.

I remember looking them all up in dictionaries, but the dictionaries just couldn’t get across the New York City zeitgeist.

The Seltzer Man is a nice one

https://www.amazon.com/Seltzer-Man-Ken-Rush/dp/1481401491

> I read lots of children’s books [..] virtually all of these books were written by people in the New York area.

And virtually all the movies we watch are made in Hollywood. I've always found it sad how impoverished this makes our media - having so much culture be produced by such a small group, we get a fairly narrow set of perspectives represented.

Agreed completely. One good development from the last 25 years was that at least Vancouver became a backdrop for so many shows, so there was somewhat more realistic weather appearing in many productions.

Not sure what I expected but I immediately recognized the bottles in the article!

https://weigel-comments.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/3v6Yz-158...

Bugs bunny using seltzer bottles as a firefighter!!! Love that!

https://archive.is/9zkhT

Seen a few Youtube videos on Brooklyn Seltzer Boys over the years, found them pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agAkMbk20y4 (for example).

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