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July 08, 2005
Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #15: Duane Reade
This factoid is more useless than average; it will be useless only to those who live and work in the New York City area.
The drugstore and pharmacy Duane Reade is everywhere you go in New York. In fact, 'Everywhere you go' is their motto. Probably the only chain more prolific than Duane Reade on Manhattan is Starbucks (not sure of this fact -- merely guessing). I wasn't sure why the store was called that. Perhaps it was because of Drs. Duane and Reade, who founded so many of these stores as a token of their pharmacopoeial magnanimity.
One day I was walking down Broadway a few blocks away from its busy intersection with Canal St, where one fifth of all humankind always seems to have gathered at any given moment. (In fact, because that intersection is smack dab in the middle of Chinatown, I am not far from the truth.) I passed two streets in succession -- Duane St and Reade St. Their juxtaposition in the non-Cartesian maze of Lower Manhattan was simply too much of a coincidence. Were Drs. Duane and Reade buried nearby? Were two consecutive streets along Broadway named after them because they wished to be united not just in the many neon signs of their eponymous store but also in the hereafter of Lower Manhattan's map? Consider my astonishment then that I found myself standing at a Duane Reade between these two streets! The plot was surely thickening.
It thinned completely and disappeared disappointingly when I went to investigate the mystery of Duane Reade's name at their website. I quote:
Duane Reade takes its name from the Company's first successful full-service drugstore, which opened in 1960 on Broadway between Duane and Reade Streets in Manhattan.
So it wasn't Drs. Duane and Reade giving their names to a store, which then got so famous that it gave its names to the streets. The streets named the store!
That, fellow New Yorkers, was today's more-useless-than-usual factoid brought to you by the World's Largest Repository of Useless Knowledge.
Posted by Vishy at July 8, 2005 12:12 AM