“Everything that I knew in 1964 is gone,” says this week’s cover artist, Bruce McCall, who came to New York from Canada that year. “I realize there’s a natural cycle. Nothing lasts more than thirty years. No shop, no franchise, even, ever stays more than thirty years. It all just keeps flipping over all the time.
“What’s going on in New York today, and I guess in most cities—the turnover of small parcels of property to big megastores and apartment buildings with large chain stores—it leaves you feeling very nostalgic. The restaurants I went to, the dry cleaner, the bank, the greasy spoons—they’re all different now. I lived on East Seventy-first Street for my first three years in Manhattan. Now a lot of the old brownstones there have been torn down, and they’re huge apartment buildings. You can’t live in this city anymore unless you’re a millionaire.”
See below for a slide show of New Yorker covers featuring local shops.
