Hayes Bickford's in Boston, maybe in the late 1930s, at 293 Huntington Avenue, near the intersection of Huntington and Gainsborough Street. Notice the dance school above. Imagine having breakfast here with pocket change during the Depression. For 30 cents you could have scrambled eggs with two fried cakes. To the right is the Gainsborough Drug Store.

The Hayes Bickford's interior was L-shaped, so it had another entrance on Gainsborough behind the drug store. This Hayes Bickford's was still in that location through the 1970s. Today that whole corner is the Symphony Market (so named because Boston Symphony Hall is one block away).

Just across the street at 289 Huntington was the Raymor Play-Mor Ballroom where big bands played. Glenn Miller did a remote broadcast from there on November 24, 1937.

For more Bickford's pics from the past, go here.

In Howl, Allen Ginsberg wrote about Bickford's at night:

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
  floated out and sat through the stale beer after
  noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
  of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
  pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
  lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
  down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
  off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
  and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
  and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

Labels: ginsberg, hayes bickford's

  ¶ 10:26 AM