Life in These Times: Sad Days in a Small Town

avatar

Thanksgiving just passed, and today I feel very thankful that I am no longer in the art gallery and gift business!

I needed to go to the post office on Wednesday, and since I wasn't actually in a hurry I decided to just amble along and truly look at the changes to our local landscape... much of it the result of Covid and movement restrictions since March of this year.

First thing I noticed was that the "76" gas station and Food Mart at the edge of town is now closed.

RD0010FoodMart.jpg

Aside from being the "last chance to get gas" before leaving town, they also had really good street tacos and the proprietors were from India, and they also had good and fresh Indian "to go food."

This closed very recently... I think it was still going, last time I came by.

RD0010BabyStore.jpg

About 200 yards down the street, what was our town's only children's and infants' clothing store has shut down. Perhaps not a huge surprise, given the median age of people living here being over 50, but still...

RD0010MartialArts.jpg

Almost next door, this used to be a thriving Martial Arts dojo, but since you can't really go out to do things that are not socially distanced... not much use for it.

I know they tried to continue with "virtual" classes... but why pay rent when you can teach those from home?

RD0010MetroBagels.jpg

This makes me really sad: This used to be "Metro Bagels," and it was the only place within an hour's drive where you could get an authentic in-house made New York style bagel with lox... this was frequently my lunch (and breakfast!) when we still had the gallery.

Made it down the hill to near where the Red Dragonfly Gallery was...

RD0010DocksideCleaners.jpg

Dockside cleaners was practically an institution around here... not only as the dry cleaning place, but they also rented tuxedos for decades of high school proms and other festivities.

Yes, that's really an old-fashioned payphone by the front door...

RD0010Gallery.jpg

This was another really nice art gallery, around the corner from our old location.

RD0010Lighthouse.jpg

The Lighthouse Café is long gone, another victim of the end of the dine-out era, or so it seems.

I saw a number of other closed places on the rest of my drive to the Post Office, but all in all, this made me wonder how many times this is repeating, across the world? What's interesting is that so many of these were "basic services," not something fancy.

Normally, this is a thriving seaside town... but with the tourists gone, none of the empty spaces are being re-leased and I have to wonder what will become of it all.

And so, I am thankful that I am no longer someone with a brick-and-mortar business!

How are things where YOU leave? Are you seeing a lot of business closures? Leave us a comment!

Thanks for reading!

20201127
H0010/0246
All images are our own



0
0
0.000
6 comments
avatar

Society is going into hibernation. This is so weird.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Hibernation.

That's a good word for it. And I have a feeling it's going to be a very long and very cold winter...

0
0
0.000
avatar

Yeah. And the only entertainment is watching people take sides and argue about what's happening.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Your post has been curated by us! Received 20.00% upvote from @opb. Do consider delegate to us to help support our project.

Do join our discord channel to give us feedback, https://discord.gg/bwb2ENt

* This bot is upvoting based on the criteria : 1. Not plagiarised, 2. Persistent previous quality posts, 3. Active engagement with other users
Do upvote this commment if you 💚 our service :)
0
0
0.000
avatar

This post has been rewarded with an upvote from city trail as part of Neoxian City Curation program . We are glad to see you using #neoxian tag in your posts. If you still not in our discord, you can join our Discord Server for more goodies and giveaways.

Do you know that you can earn NEOXAG tokens as passive income by delegating to @neoxiancityvb. Here are some handy links for delegations: 100HP, 250HP, 500HP, 1000HP. Read more about the bot in this post. Note: The liquid neoxag reward of this comment will be burned and stake will be used for curation.

0
0
0.000