Since L + M’s medical office building sits between the former site of two very different, and often rival, Italian neighborhoods, I am always keen to hear when one of the Shaw Street Italians or the Fort Trumball Italians tells me stories. And so I chatted with Frank Muscarella recently, one of the mainly Sicilian Italians from the Shaw Street neighborhood.

Commerce on Shaw Street in the 1930s is a very different thing from the commerce of Amazon and Internet buying.

Take clothing, for instance. Every Saturday, a clothier named “Itchy” would come by to all the homes on Moore Avenue, leaving clothes inside the unlocked foyer of each house. No one locked doors back then. When “Itchy” finally got his own car, he would leave the car on the top of Moore Avenue, engine running and no parking break applied, and run to drop off his packages, keeping even with the car slowly rolling unattended down the street.

According the Frank, Itchy never crashed his car. Over the course of the week, Frank’s grandmother would remind him to try on this or that shirt or shoes to see if it fit because “Itchy is coming Saturday” to collect either the money or his unused merchandise.

The iceman delivered blocks of ice. Eggs and milk were delivered too. Frank said that almost nothing except meat was bought from traveling salesmen. The “newer generation” of people (those not off the boat from Italy) would buy their bread in a bakery, but Frank’s grandmother would spend every Friday baking bread in a kerosene oven for the whole week. Since there was no heat in the house, the kitchen was the only place to be in the winter.

The flour was purchased from an IGA, he said, on Montauk and Willets (where the Cumberland Farms is now). Frank’s grandmother would give his mother 12 cents for flour, but if they charged 13 cents, she wouldn’t buy it at that exorbitant rate. The bread would, of course, become rather hard by the end of the week, and Frank’s grandfather would use that bread for his morning breakfast, dipping the hard bread in his espresso with anisette liquor and have two poached eggs. When his grandmother wasn’t looking, Frank’s grandfather would put a spoonful of his own anisette/espresso mixture into Frank’s cup of espresso.

The family bought meat at Longo’s Meat on Shaw. Across the street was Deloro’s, and the two proprietors apparently didn’t get along, but Frank doesn’t know why.

Saturday also was the day that a horse and wagon would pull up and a man with a water stone wheel would sharpen knives. People would line up and for 4 cents have their knives sharpened.

The Lawrence Hospital was where L + M is today, but it was a lot smaller. Frank’s family doctor was Dr. Dyer whose office was on Moore and Montauk. When Frank was sick, Dr. Dyer would visit after seeing patients at his office, and he would charge $5 for a visit. If Frank’s grandmother or grandfather were ill, Dr. Dyer would not charge money but would be paid with some of his grandmother’s bread or lasagna.

Now I’m no historian, economist or even a good mathematician, but I did consult the best bread expert, my Zia Antonietta, who calculates that 5 pounds of flour would be needed to make the week’s bread. At the IGA today, that would cost about $2.40, or about 20 times what Frank’s grandmother paid. Applying that ratio to medical bills, the cost in today’s dollars of a sick-child visit in an ethnic neighborhood should be around $100, a calculation that would seem to make a liar out of those who say that the cost of medicine is growing out of control.

The price tag on a plate of Frank’s grandmother’s lasagna today? Priceless.