There are plenty of places to buy nuts in Manhattan, from Whole Foods to CVS to the occasional subway platform. But if you want them fresh, perhaps even still warm, from the roaster, SP’s Nuts and Candy may well be your only option.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/nyregion/04nuts.html
And Economy Candy, a Lower East Side institution since 1937, still sells nuts along with its dried fruit and sweets, but no longer roasts. “It just became too much, with the oils and the smells and the Fire Department coming to inspect every week,” said Jerry Cohen, the owner. “You need this permit, that permit — they don’t let you live.”
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William Black may have seen it all coming way back in 1932 when he converted his 18 Chock full o’ Nuts stores into coffee shops. Deep in the clutches of the Great Depression, buying shelled nuts seemed too much of a frivolous luxury, said Arthur Schwartz, who wrote “Arthur Schwartz’s New York City Food: An Opinionated History and More Than 100 Legendary Recipes.”
“I’m not old enough to remember the heyday of this,” Mr. Schwartz, 62, said. “But there used to be a man dressed up as a peanut outside of a nut store in Times Square,” he added, referring to the Planters nut shop at 1560 Broadway, which he and his family would visit from Brooklyn before it closed around 1960.
The view north from One Times Square in 1937.
A Chock full o’ Nuts store in 1969. The founder of the chain converted them from nut stores to coffee shops in 1932.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/nyregion/04nuts.html
And Economy Candy, a Lower East Side institution since 1937, still sells nuts along with its dried fruit and sweets, but no longer roasts. “It just became too much, with the oils and the smells and the Fire Department coming to inspect every week,” said Jerry Cohen, the owner. “You need this permit, that permit — they don’t let you live.”
*
William Black may have seen it all coming way back in 1932 when he converted his 18 Chock full o’ Nuts stores into coffee shops. Deep in the clutches of the Great Depression, buying shelled nuts seemed too much of a frivolous luxury, said Arthur Schwartz, who wrote “Arthur Schwartz’s New York City Food: An Opinionated History and More Than 100 Legendary Recipes.”
“I’m not old enough to remember the heyday of this,” Mr. Schwartz, 62, said. “But there used to be a man dressed up as a peanut outside of a nut store in Times Square,” he added, referring to the Planters nut shop at 1560 Broadway, which he and his family would visit from Brooklyn before it closed around 1960.
The view north from One Times Square in 1937.
A Chock full o’ Nuts store in 1969. The founder of the chain converted them from nut stores to coffee shops in 1932.
