Framed or unframed, desk size to sofa size, printed by us in Arizona and Alabama since 2007. Explore now.
Shorpy is funded by you. Patreon contributors get an ad-free experience.
Learn more.
October 1940. "Grand Forks, North Dakota." 35mm nitrate negative by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.
is a 1939 Ford Deluxe 2 door sedan. Better later than never.
From left,
1940 Chevy with deluxe rear center guard.
1937-38 Chrysler
1937 Nash
1939 Chrysler?
1940 Oldsmobile
Comments welcome.
$1.98 in 1940 would be about $32 today. Not a bad price for a man's hat.
So, is no one going to identify the autos, especially the fourth from the left?
P.S. I've been away for five weeks. Glad to be back and I'll be catching up with Shorpy as best I can.
As a side note, Kiewel's Beer was brewed in Little Falls, Minnesota, while Heileman's Old Style (hanging sign over the tavern door) was brewed in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Nostalgic picture which is so similar to the small town in which I grew up but on the East Coast. Our businesses on Main Street (with the same kind of diagonal parking before meters) were Carroll Cut Rate, Adam's Hats,Gene's Bar featuring Rheingold beer, Pete's Barber Shop and Bashura's Shoe Repair. I used to love the fumes in the shoemakers and cleaners, both now deemed very lethal, i.e. shoe polish, glues, leather-tanning chemicals and carbon tetrachloride. We also had a Hart's Five and Dime and a First National grocery. Kind of neat to think that whether you grew up in the East or Midwest, the small town Main Streets were so similar.
Instead of selling beer, that location is home to a bakery. The Dotty Dunn hat store was at 17 N. 3rd Street. It, the bar and the dry cleaners are all gone, even the cut rate store to the left. The only building that survives is the one to the extreme right. Which appears to have a barber shop. BTW, Dotty Dunn Hats was a chain store operation.
Once again, like the Chicago photo, few people and an angle chosen that makes it seem that you're looking down on a detailed area of a really cool O-gauge layout. Perhaps that's what Vachon was trying to capture.
Bull City Boy has a great question, what is that automobile? A totally different look from the others. I haven't clue alas, [Lincoln Zephyr?] but now I gotta find out. What is it?
On Shorpy:
Today’s Top 5