HERE’S a 1930s look at Feitsen’s Drug Store in the 1930s, on 45th Avenue and 147th Street. Out of the picture across the street are Parsons Boulevard and Flushing Hospital (where I was looked at for bronchitis in 2000). This was a good 60 years before I arrived in the area. At the time, 45th Avenue was served by a trolley line that later turned into the Q65 bus.
I have always been perplexed by drug stores, which almost never sell only prescription drugs. Many sold (and some perhaps still do) sell cigarettes by the pack and by the box — the very cigarettes that cause the diseases that drugs are made to combat. Many double as groceries, with drinks, snacks, cosmetics, aisles and aisles of them, with only a couple of aisles given over to health-related items.
As we see above, drugstores also doubled as soda fountains in the old days, with elaborate setups of marble stands behind which stood white-coated and white-capped soda jerks ready to dispense ice cream sodas and egg creams. All this, to me, seemed a far cry from the other items on sale there: compunds produced in laboratories that alleviated sicknesses. How did the two ever get combined like this?
By 2022, the corner had changed; the small two-color stoplight that was enough to control traffic has become a two-directional guy-wired stoplight. The drugstore building remains…you can tell by the roofline…but it’s now a Carvel franchise. Thus, things have come full circle. The common denominator is ice cream, which was available here in the 1930s and in 2022. As for the drugs, there’s a pharmacy across on Parsons Boulevard, as you would expect near a hospital.
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7/1/24