A Lower East Side Doomsday Shelter With Every Candy You Could Possibly Think Of
Everyone has an outlandish fear that follows them from childhood throughout life. I suffer from a crippling spider phobia, which recently resulted in me trapping a spider in my dust buster, duct taping all possible openings on the machine, and leaving it in my hallway for a few weeks until I’m confident the spider has died so it cannot come find me and murder me in my sleep. However there is one universally felt, very real fear that instills in its viewers the same unhinged recklessness today as it did 25 years ago:
THAT BOAT SCENE FROM WILLY WONKA
Rewatch this family friendly snippet from your childhood – you probably forgot about the chicken getting decapitated because you were too distracted by all the kids dying in various factory accidents from unsafe labor conditions.
Looking at the film from a less fiendishly scary side, for a child, the thought of being in a giant room full of candy is euphoria. You’re still at an age where you have enamel on your teeth and a working metabolism so that fantasy is heaven. Well get some Sensodyne and prepare for the wrath of refined sugar because at 108 Rivington Street in the Lower East Side stands Economy Candy, a New York institution that delivers a simultaneous 2-1 bunch of a nostalgia and sugar rush with the closest you’ll get at living out Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Room.
Upon walking inside, you’re hit with floor-to-20-foot-ceiling, wall-to-wall suffocatingly omnipresent candy. Economy candy boasts over 2,000 varieties of candy and a thick scent of sugar hangs the air, transmitting a contact sugar high to anyone who steps foot inside. They literally sell every candy you’ve ever had, seen, wished for, even flavors you couldn’t imagine. Paralyzingly overwhelming.
Morris Cohen opened Economy Shoes on a LES corner in 1937, near the end of the Great Depression. As shoe sales waned, Morris’s side candy business became the store’s sole revenue maker. Recently laid off workers flocked to the Rivington Street storefront, seeking tokens of childhood nostalgia. And so began Economy Candy. The store has stayed in family hands since, survived in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and still sells over 20,000 pounds of candy on Halloween.