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History Video of the Day: The East Village Egg Store
By
Garth Johnston
Published Aug 12, 2006
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Aug 12, 2006
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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A fact of life in Gotham is that things change and we move on. We're just not a big memorial kind of city - quick, where was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire? - generally speaking we're too busy moving forward to look back (with some exceptions). This habit of ours goes from major events that happened a century ago to that deli on the corner that closed last month. But moving on doesn't mean we necessarily forget stuff. We just stumble upon (or put) their mementos online.
For instance the above video. Did you know that there used to be an Egg Store on East Seventh Street between Second and First? An egg store which was only open on Thursdays and specialized in undated white and brown eggs from Jersey? Because there was, and that is it in that vimeo clip up there.
The Egg Store was a mom-and-pop shop run by the family that owned Shady Hollow Farm in New Jersey. They ran it from the fifties until the mid-eighties at which point a local woman, Olga Worobel, took over for the store's last couple years. Every Thursday for years "people used to line up," Worobel told the Times in 1991. "The whole neighborhood came and stood in line and talked. Waiting for eggs was like church: it brought people together." While we weren't around for those glory days, it certainly had a following in our childhood (that's our sister in the vimeo) and those eggs really were something great.
It's neighborhood ghosts like the Egg Store (and Mike the Butcher) that hammer in to us just how greatly Manhattan has changed in the past two decades. We wonder what the equivalent to a once-a-week Egg Store is now?
Fresh Jersey Eggs (Open Thursday Only) by Gail Epps on Vimeo
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