Now. September 2011. 1275 Danforth today.
Thanks Moose! I've always hoped to see a picture of this building in its heyday. I remember it in the 1970s when it was painted all brown and had a Loblaws store on the ground floor. The neatest thing about it was the bricked off area at the side where if the door was open, you could see stairs going to the second floor - as kids we always wondered what was on those mysterious upper floors. An single-storey addition was built on the west side (at the right in the photo) which had a Tamblyn drugstore in it. Tamblyn later became Boots Drug Stores and then Pharma Plus. The Loblaws store closed when the Leslie & Lake Shore store opened up, and the drugstore moved to the standalone building to the right of the apartment building in your photo.
If I remember the layout of the store correctly, the produce section was at the front of the building as the main entrance was at the west side, which faced onto a parking lot. I will always remember the regular cashiers, middle-aged ladies named Ruth, and Betty (who wore glasses with a cord attached so she could take them off and not lose them) and being amazed at watching their fingers flying over the cash register buttons as they checked the items and they never looked at the cash registers as they were doing this. My cousins and I always looked forward to taking back pop bottles for the deposit and if we had enough of them, we would get a couple of crisp, brand-new dollar bills, some of which I've saved to this day.
Thanks for bringing back some great memories!
