Private Investors Start Parking Garage

This photo accompanied an article about plans to build a 400 car parking garage in the same block as the Dubrow's Cafeteria in Manhattan. If you look closely (resolution on the photo is not great) you can see the Dubrow's sign on both sides of the building. It touts the construction because "it will give Manhattan's West Side its first privately financed storage center since construction of the Radio City garage." (New York Times, January 7,1951) Those financers called themselves "515 Seventh Avenue Corporation" and are headed by Lawrence Mayer, David Harris, and Irving Karpas.

The Times article cuts off, so other then in the photo there's no explicit reference to Dubrow's. It would seem to me that this would have been in the very early years of the Manhattan Dubrow's - in fact, it might even be the initial plans for that location. I'm not sure.

Also, it would seem to me that this is a premonition of the demise of Dubrow's - after all, even though Dubrow's served the garment workers in Manhattan for many years, I suspect the 400 car garage was not built for them, and so the need for such a construction suggests that even as early as the 1950's the face of Manhattan was beginning to change.