Near Flatbush

Heading up Fifth on the B63 I passed the wooden building that used to be Paul's fruit & vegetable store. Paul's closed in 2015 to become the unremarkable Brooklyn Market & Deli, & I hadn't paid it much attention since then.  These days it's Lickers N Sniffers Pet Services, a doggy daycare/grooming/pet sitting/dog walking center.  A very of-the-moment urban service niche.

2019

Here are a couple of views from several years ago.

2013

2007


The upper section of the facade has barely changed at all in recent decades, but it once sported a wall of glass windows upstairs, where the second-floor space was also used as retail.

The Department of Records tax photographs shown above, taken between 1939 and 1941, show Paul's as Stutmann and Grannemann's Scandinavian Food Center, a "certified delicatessen."On one side of the Food Center you can see O'Connors Bar and Grill (1931 - 2011) with a fancier facade than is evident in its Grill-less 1980s years. Was the original building was replaced or merely altered? O'Connor's - down at heel and infinitely charismatic at the end - was succeeded by the expanded sports bar McMahon's around 2014. On the other side of the Food Center the photograph shows a plumbing and roofing business.

A decade later the deli is Stutmann's alone & the roofing & plumbing business has been replaced by a fruit & vegetable store.  As always in the city, the streetscape is never static.  A part of the fruit and vegetable store's sign - "Mohawk" - is visible, reminding one that this part of Fifth was close to Little Caughnawaga, a thriving community of Mohawk ironworkers and their families from the 1920s to the 1970s.