The Deleted Scenes - New and Old #104
Readers: This week marks the two-year anniversary of this newsletter! For just this week, I’m offering an anniversary discount for new yearly subscribers, in case you’ve been on the fence about upgrading to a paid subscription. Your support—whether reading, sharing, or subscribing—keeps this thing going. Here’s to another year of The Deleted Scenes! I looked for fun articles for this roundup that touch on the main beats I follow at this newsletter: urbanism, food, retail, and the sort of culture writing that mixes these things together. Enjoy.
I worked, briefly, for an architectural salvage store in the D.C. area in grad school. It was fun, like volunteering in a thrift store but with a much wider range of materials that you rarely see outside of Home Depot. (Habitat for Humanity runs similar stores, but much smaller.) Based on the relatively limited experience I have with this sort of thing, these stores and businesses are tough to run profitably. Based on this bit, the whole enterprise might, all told, not be profitable at all:
But it also seems to me that there’s a tremendous amount of value to be wrung out here, with the right processes/experience/expertise. And the more this kind of thing grows, the more smoothly it will all work. Good stuff. Where Have All the Fragments Gone?, Lapham’s Quarterly, Elizabeth Della Zazzera, November 5, 2019 In a reply to one of my recent pieces about discount department stores, somebody recalled Zayre, or a similar store, selling little fragments of the Berlin Wall back in 1989. So of course, I had to go down that rabbit hole. I found this interesting piece on the post-fall history of the wall, which notes that it ended up everywhere from memorial gardens (large slabs) to souvenir shops (usually small chunks.)
It’s an interesting long piece, but I kept looking for the American department store bit. It turns out a lot of stores sold the fragments as collectibles, all over the United States, from K-Mart to Service Merchandise to Bloomingdales. And take a look at this detail:
Apparently, in later years, interior chunks of the wall without any of the iconic graffiti were all that was left, and to juice sales, dealers (no longer American stores) spray painted them to simulate the appearance of the “prime” pieces. I’m too young to have seen these in stores, and I’d never heard of this before. Interesting bit of retail history. Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong, Financial Times, Marianna Giusti, March 23, 2023
Grandi, channeling Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, calls it the “invention of tradition.” I’m Italian, and I’ve learned over the years that most Italian food in America is an Americanized sub-cuisine, much the way Americanized Chinese food is a distinct cuisine from what’s eaten in China. I also learned that a breakfast egg dish my mom used to make for me, which her mother made for her—little fritters made of scrambled egg mixed with Italian seasoned breadcrumbs—is in fact not a breakfast dish, but an old recipe for mock meatballs, hailing from Italian peasants in the southeast of Italy. In America, meat was plentiful and cheap. Hence spaghetti and meatballs. So it’s not surprising to me that some actual Italian dishes might not be actually Italian, or that a lot of “classics” are much newer than you might think. But then, what does a phrase like “actually Italian” mean? Food is fundamentally evolutionary; chilies aren’t native to Asia and tomatoes aren’t native to Europe (and therefore Italy), for example; “Indian food” in America and the UK is largely a small, restaurant-style subset of Indian cuisine. The dumplings of Russia and Eastern Europe are thought to be descended from Chinese dumplings. Sometimes discussion of “authenticity” gets bound up with arguments over political correctness. A more useful way to think about all of this, I think, is to understand that cuisines are not created; they have evolved. While it might seem counterintuitive, the fact that post-World War II Americans in Italy, or Italians influenced by them, invented carbonara, just underscores the evolutionary point. So I suppose I half-agree with this excerpt:
Grandi is sort of being a culinary creationist; I’d say the old panettone was the archaeopteryx, and the new one is the bird. The mix of continuity and lack of continuity goes together. Here’s to me one of the most fascinating examples of this sort of thing:
(My emphasis). Read the whole thing! There’s a lot more. Shot Chaser, Washington City Paper, Darrow Montgomery, March 16, 2023
I’ve seen some of these small liquor stores, or at least ones like them. There are a lot of intersections in D.C. where one corner has an old-school liquor store and another has a ramen shop. Two different eras. In some ways, two different worlds. I’m a Total Wine shopper, and not much of a spirits guy, but I’ve been inside plenty of independent liquor stores, including a handful of these urban ones. They might make you think of big malt liquor cans and wine coolers, but I’ve been surprised that decent wine and craft beer is for sale in a lot of these places these days. The stores sell what’s on the market, and the market itself has changed. It’s a photo essay heavy on photos, and they’re great. Check it out. I’ll also show you a neat D.C.-adjacent liquor store in Langley Park, Maryland, a working-class community that straddles Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties. It’s been closed for several years and I never did get my own photo of it, so here’s Google Maps. A local news story noted, “The store has a sordid past.” Related Reading: Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter, discounted just this week! You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 600 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
Key phrases
Older messages
The Fairfax Teardown
Thursday, April 6, 2023
Housing demand + zoning = this
Taking Preservation Into Their Own Hands
Wednesday, April 5, 2023
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #104
Roses Are Red, Walmarts Are Blue
Tuesday, April 4, 2023
A close look at what discount-store consolidation took from us
America's Urban Heritage: Culpeper, Virginia Edition
Monday, April 3, 2023
The kind of place we should keep building
Nature Walking
Saturday, April 1, 2023
Taking a breath
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