For eighty years, a store named Radio Clinic* stood on the 98th Street block of Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. My immigrant grandfather opened it in 1934 during the depths of the Depression as a radio repair shop. To distinguish his shop from his many nearby competitors in those early days of radio, he sat fixing radios in the storefront window – visible to the public in his “clinic” -- wearing a white doctor’s lab coat. The business grew over the decades to sell radios, televisions, appliances big and small, electronics, and air conditioners, lots and lots of air conditioners.
Jen Rubin's book, We Are Staying: Eighty Years in the Life of a Family, a Store, and a Neighborhood, tells about the rise , struggles, and fall, and the family that owned it across those decades. It is a small business story and a story about a shop owner that keeps on going despite the odds. It is an immigrant story, a grandfather-father-daughter story, a story of the unique character a family business brings to a neighborhood, and a reflection on what has been lost as stores like these disappear.
