Street in Manhattan

That’s Max Hubacher’s title for this April 13, 1953 photo: Some mildly conclusive sleuthing: most of the visible company names aren’t rare enough to make searching for business addresses from 70 years ago very easy. The best bet is the building at the corner on the left, which has a compnay that sure looks like “Listokin & Sons.” That company was at 125 Hester Street on the Lower East Side in 1970 and 87 Hester in 1981. If we guess that they liked Hester Street, the building at the northwest corner of Hester and Eldridge Streets has the addresses 107 Hester and 67 Eldridge, which fits. Here’s that building in 1940, and the facade matches. So it appears we’re looking north up Eldridge, which is part of the center of the neighborhood. The reason I started my search on the Lower East Side is the combination of narrow streets and block after block of tenements. That particular vista looks much the same today, although the semi-industrial storefronts are mostly gone.