Damn That Moses!

The feather in every city reporter’s cap — the Times’ Nicholas Confessore finds a subject who still curses Robert Moses:

To survey the history of Frank’s Department Store, you need only look at the merchandise scattered and stacked about the place. A partial list, in no particular order, includes children’s sailor suits, bone knitting needles, thermal underwear, truckers’ caps featuring the 1980’s sitcom puppet Alf, corduroy slacks with blue piping, newsboy hats, bicentennial American flags, gray plaid knickers and black nylon stockings preserved in tissue paper.

Since the 1930’s, Frank’s has carried a little bit of everything for everybody, crammed into a single long, musty room on Union Street in Brooklyn, one block from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Today the few leftovers layer the shelves and counters like rock strata.

. . .

Now Frank’s, too, is a relic. These days, if you want pantyhose, you go to Duane Reade; if you want corduroys, you go to Old Navy. (If you want knickers, you’re pretty much out of luck.) Some time in the coming days, when it finishes selling its stock, Frank’s will go dark.

“A store like this is really passé; it’s an antique,” Mrs. Milea said. “Business has not been good.”

Once, Frank’s was part of the thriving commercial district along Columbia Street. With the nearby waterfront booming, and pushcarts filled with fruits and vegetables lining the streets, Frank Sacco borrowed $1,500 from his in-laws in 1937 and opened the store in a space a few doors west of its current location.

. . .

Construction of the expressway in the 1950’s, however, sliced the area in half, cutting Frank’s off from many of its customers. “I wasn’t too fond of Moses,” says Mrs. Milea, referring to Robert Moses, New York’s master builder and prime mover of the expressway, among many other projects. Then the shipping industry began to trickle across the harbor to New Jersey, taking jobs with it and sending the Columbia Street area into a slow decline.

And big, big bonus points to dropping in a totally organic reference to Alf trucker caps . . . !