Friday Photo: Shops ‘Til They Dropped

(Photo: James and Karla Murray)

“Ideal Dinettes” sounds like an establishment dreamed up by Thomas Pynchon, but in fact, it existed for 55 years, selling utopian kitchen and dining room furniture until closing in 2008. The Brooklyn shop and hundreds more timeworn New York City storefronts are lovingly preserved in Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York (Gingko Press), a new book by photographers and authors James and Karla Murray. An ode to the endangered species of the mom and pop shop, Store Front takes the reader on a technicolor walking tour of humble neighborhood haunts (Ralph’s Discount City) and New York institutions (Katz’s Delicatessen), all captured in stunning oversize images alongside interviews with shop owners. The bittersweet chronicle of the urban retail life cycle doubles as a fascinating atlas of street typography. The book also inspired “MOM & POPism,” a Gawker Artists exhibition in which graffiti and street artists including Celso, Under Water Pirates, and Zoltron applied their own colorful touches to life-sized reproductions of the Murrays’ images. Check out their photographs of their photographs in a selection of installation shots here.

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