It's a ramshackle contraption on wheels. It features a bench with two chair tops that have had their legs sawed off. It has four foot rests and a roof to keep off the rain. These makeshift, personalized booths used to exist all over town.
They were like the newsman-owned newsstands, like Petrella's Point, before Bloomberg turned them all into ticky-tacky boxes.
Inside, the signs say, "Mel's shine brings out the soul in your shoes." Nice. And: "Mel says... When there's a shine on your shoes, there's a Mel-o-dy in your heart," which is a line from a song best known from the musical The Band Wagon, starring Fred Astaire. But here's a pretty fantastic rendition from the Lawrence Welk Show, featuring a tap-dancing U.S. Marine in full dress blues.
Really, that's the feeling you get when you get a shine from a stand like Mel's.
8 comments:
As you go on and on about such things, dear 'Prophet', why not pay a bit more attention to other vanishing things. One would think such a saavy, with-it East Villager, so 'hunkered down' and all that as you pretend to be with the fictional Jeremiah who just seems to be everywhere at once, would at least pay tribute to the late Jim Neu who died last week. Oh - but maybe you'd have to re a real New Yorker, a TRUE East Villager to know who Jim was and his impact and talent. Perhaps a Jeremiah-come-lately wouldn't know such an icon of the 60's 70's, 80's although he went strong right up to the end. Now go look him up, False prophet.
Beautiful.
nice find. Wow, someone is bitter...
...not bitter at all. I just enjoy pointing out the puffed up, pretentious phoniness that is Jerimiah Moss, whoever the actual blogger is, and wherever the actual blogger hails from. His posing as the ultimate New York know-it-all, his wallowing in pseudo nostalgia for a city he never saw is amusing, sad and quite often misleading as to what it was really like for those of us who have lived it our entire lives. I will continue, when I have the time, to call out this puffed up pretentious poseur of a pretend New Yorker.
How dare you write about some thing when some other thing happened that you didn't write about!
Nice to see something like this near Times Square, takes a little of the sting of the giant Red Lobster away. Great photos and nice post.
"Prophet DeBunker" sounds a lot like that psycho Susanna who stalks and threatens other bloggers.
Interesting to note that this loony tune rants about some guy without telling anyone who he is/was.
i appreciate the sentiments here. to keep this from becoming an off-topic "flame war," i won't be publishing any more comments on this thread unless they are directly about Mel's Place. thanks.
Post a Comment