Beatty Street Under Summer Blue Skies, The Burg
This is a new picture taken on my latest Burg picture
walk a few days ago. It was taken from about where
the alley is before you reach Hub City Liquor Store
at South Broad Street. You can see what was once
Paramount Bakery where Beatty Street meets Genesee
Street and you can see what was once a Hobby Shop
where Beatty Street meets South Clinton Avenue:)
3 comments:
Mack, this is another "Where to begin?" image. You are at Freudenmacher Alley and Beatty St.
From left to right, the Hub Liquors parking lot used to be the back yard of the Bijou Tailors building. Lots of businesses in the neighborhood had the name Bijou (pronounced Bye-Joe!). The buiding appears to have been expanded to include a second floor over what was a one story pressing shop. There was a steam pipes on the roof that had periodic white clouds whenever the steam press was used.
Continuing on Baatty and across Genesee street is the triple-decker where the Rosetti family once lived. In the back yard, Mr. Rosetti built a tomato pie restaurant that was pretty good. Unfortunately the restaurant did not withstand the test of time. Mr. Rosetti moved out to Pennington Circle and was selling pie into the '80s.
Across Beatty was the the old Paramount Bakery, which is still a Hispanic bakery (Whoo hoo!).
Coming back on right side of Beatty St - the yellow building with the beautiful boarded windows was at one time a barber shop belonging to Zoltan Kopczik in the '50s.
The vacant lot behind that was a feed store. This place catered to the remaining horse and buggy owners and to those that grew chickens and pigeons in backyard coops.
Having a chicken coop was leftover from WW-II, like having a Victory Garden. Some were pretty elaborate. There were a few Burg residents grew and flew messenger pigeons for food and fun.
In the 1950's it seemed like one of four households had a pigeon coop. Those little squab were tasty little things and made a noodle soup that was out of this world.
Today in Trenton, it's not even legal to keep birds. The old timers were grandfathered in but I suspect most of those are gone now.
As a kid it was cool just knowing whose flock was streaming by! "Nah, those aren't Mister Mazur's he doesn't have that many black birds in his flock. Best air show on earth when they were exercised each day. And a few folks raced them. With the bands on the legs and drove them out of the city and they always made it back.
I guess the last bird home was soup?
Skipper
Hi SJ & Skip.
Thanks for the trip down Burg
memory lane. I had no idea about the chickens in the yard thing:)
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