Summer in the City
One of the magical things about living in New York is the knowledge that no matter how long you live here, you will never stop seeing things you've never seen before, learning things about the city you never knew. There's always a block that you've walked by a thousand times and never strolled down...that turns out to be a secret beauty. A store you've never ventured into that turns out to have just what you're looking for. A restaurant you've never heard of that, once sampled, proves to serve something so good, you can't believe you've never tasted it before.
Case in point...
Last night, I was walking down a stretch of Columbus Avenue, between 70th and 71st, that I've walked a hundred times if I've walked it once. For some reason, I happened to look up at a building on the west side of the street. High on its red brick facade was a large, wooden sign I'd never noticed before. "J.M. Horton Ice Cream Co.," it said in grand old block letters. The sign looked old, and I couldn't believe that I'd never seen it before.
On arriving home, I promptly googled "J.M. Horton Ice Cream," and found something, of course. (How did we live without Google?)
J.M Horton was an ice cream maker founded, apparently, in 1873. At one point, it was the largest ice cream company in New York, selling three-fifths of all the city's ice cream, and providing desserts to several presidential inaugurals. It existed in that Columbus Avenue location even before 1904, when the IKT, New York's first subway line, began running on nearby Broadway. A few shops down the block was a little store called Hellman's Deli. You will recognize the name as the maker of the mayonnaise that we can't eat as much of as we'd like to.
Pretty great, huh? A sign from the past saved into the present. A reminder of what the Upper West Side once was.
The Yanks are in first place, Johnny Damon's hitting streak ended, and the J.M. Horton sign rules over Columbus Avenue. Who cares about the weather? (Which is miserable, by the way.) There's no better city in the world.
