Store Fronts

Store Fronts
by James T and Karla L. Murray
Published 10th March 2014, first edition

This book was written by James T and Karla L. Murray. They decided to go around New York photographing shop fronts and did so for many years.  They made it their mission to document the stores thoroughly and also arranged the book into five chapters to correspond to the five boroughs of New York City which are Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

They spoke to the shop owners to get as much information on the history of the shops themselves.  The book is an A3 hard back size and it has 330 pages in it.

Some of the shops in Manhattan are covered in graffiti and one or two are in dyer needs of repair, but then as you work you way through the book the majority of he businesses are fully laden with stock and look quite inviting, they range from Restaurants to flower shops to electronic & appliances to ice cream parlours and sweets, so they have a good range of shops and not forgetting the liquor stores, they have also included in the the book panoramic photographs over a couple of pages to show the entire block.

Unfortunately years on some of the shops they photographed have closed down which was astoundingly almost one third of the stores they captured.

This is happening everywhere as one would notice in Newport, Gwent, many of the shops have either closed for good or have moved out to the Retail Park and after a while you forget what shops used to be there so I found the book a good idea to log down all the shops for prosperity