A long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed New York—long before smartphones, Ubers, and LinkNYC streetside screens were daily facts of life—a labyrinth of caverns below the surface of the city was filled with newsstands peddling physical newspapers filled with all the Jurassic news that was fit to print.
Most of these newsstands have shuttered, and these days schoolkids don’t know one when they see one, according to MTA worker Marjorie Nassirou. “It’s prehistoric,” she said. Boomers, on the other hand, are delighted to see Rex’s Dino Store, a new pop-up newsstand kiosk in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza station near the Plaza Street East/Vanderbilt Avenue exit. “I tease them, I ask them if they went to school with the owner,” Nassirou said.
Rex, the stately papier-mache Tyrannosaurus rex proprietor of the Dino Store, definitely has a few years on the station passersby. Behind a plexiglass window, he proffers a vast variety of antediluvian offerings. From issues of Jurassic Park Slope Courier to Trilo-bite snacks to Snarlboro cigarettes, the jam-packed kiosk offers a barrage of dino details that would take far more time to appreciate than most rushed commuters are willing to spare…