Near the foot of Broadway in days of yore—down where the tugboats docked, street drunks could get a bowl of soup at the Port Mission for a song and, blessedly, no one called it “Fells” —you always knew when Christmas was around the corner.
Baby dolls, tricycles and glass ornaments made by the George Franke company appeared alongside of plus-size underwear and bolts of fabric in the windows of Shockets (713 South Broadway) and Goldenberg’s (Fleet and Broadway); gin mills like Zeppie’s at Ann and Thames served shots from holiday bottles of Four Roses and the horseradish stand went up at the Prevas Brothers lunch counter in the city market.
Had the ancient Greek botanist Pedanius Dioscorides stopped by for a 35-cent bottle of the good stuff (half-a-buck for large) he would have asked for Persicon sinapi. One of the first to mention horseradish in writing, Discorides’ name for the root means “Persian mustard.”…