It wasn’t until the late 1950s, when the Spruce Hotel was sold to a new owner and became the Parker Hotel, that the hotel began to change. | Images courtesy of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Spruce Hotel stationary from 1927 (left) and 1933 (right). Many Spruce Hotel residents took their meals at the pharmacy’s lunch counter which, through the 1940s, served a Blue Plate Special dinner on fine china.
It sold luxury perfumes, Vogue magazine, Whitman’s Chocolates, and Cuban cigars. He started out in Strawberry Mansion, but Parker Hotel Pharmacy would be his finest. This wasn’t my grandfather’s first pharmacy. There was a posh furrier on 13th Street between Spruce and Pine in what is now a dubious fortune teller’s storefront. The pharmacy’s success was ensured from the start by the solid middle class neighborhood and proximity of the Academy of Music, Shubert Theater, and upscale shops. Its 209 rooms with shared baths were rented to single “gentlemen.” Across the street, the Lenox, built in 1916 in the Colonial Revival Style, was (and still is) one of the most elegant apartment buildings in Washington Square West. The 12-story building, known then as the Spruce Hotel, was built in 1923 in the Art Deco style with a touch of Colonial Revivalism. When the pharmacy first opened in 1932, on the heels of the Great Depression, the hotel was an asset to the neighborhood. It also meant leaving to my imagination the phantom dangers that lurked inside the forbidden Parker Hotel.īad reputation aside, it wasn’t always this way. “If you need to use the bathroom, go to the house,” my grandmother would say.
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As much I had free reign of the drugstore, including guzzling milkshakes and stuffing my pockets with candy, lipsticks, and magazines, the Parker Hotel lobby next door was strictly off limits. I also eventually learned that “Doc,” which my grandfather was dubbed by customers, wasn’t his real name. I would later come to understand that they didn’t actually own the Parker Hotel Pharmacy, nicknamed “The Store,” but leased it from the adjacent hotel. 5 perfume, and a lunch counter dishing out Cherry Cokes and hamburgers. It was there that they ruled over a kingdom of prescription drugs, Good & Plenty licorice candy, Chanel No. When I was a kid I thought my grandparents, Sam and Anna Friedman, owned the northeast corner of 13th and Spruce. The infamous Parker Hotel reopened as a Marriott Fairfield Inn & Suites after four years of major renovations, labor union picketing, and an L&I “Stop Work” order.