The Life in My Years

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge for this first week of September is Commercial Buildings and Store Fronts.

One of my favorite places in San Francisco is Chinatown. There are two major streets through Chinatown. Grant Ave. which I try to avoid, is where the souvenir shops peddle threadbare t-shirts, postcards and plastic Buddhas. Stockton Street is where the local residents shop for baked goods, meats, produce, groceries and medicinals. Along with Chinatown’s alleys, Stockton Street is the place to go when you’re in the area.   

 

Two hundred miles or so east of San Francisco is Virginia City, an old silver mining town in the mountains of western Nevada.

Meanwhile back in San Francisco.  Fox Hardware is an old school hardware store in downtown.

In 1980 I was working retail in the tool department when I met my wife to be who was doing the payroll for the company.  This is how the store looks today, still going strong. Not shown is the dive bar across the alley from the store where my coworkers and I would go to have shots of Jack Daniels during our morning and afternoon breaks  Some things have changed; The inside has been greatly rearranged in the intervening 40 years; As with most companies these days it’s likely that employees don’t date each other; and I doubt that the employees visit a bar to drink while on break.

To view Cee’s site and her gallery of photos and links to other photographer’s cites please follow the link.