One Sunday in 1969, my father drove our family to the Near West Side, and we had lunch at Manny’s, an old-school Jewish cafeteria with a checkout counter that was a shrine to the coffee shops of mid-century America — the fortress-like cash register, nothing electronic about it, the pad of artificial grass on the counter’s glass top, the spindle on which guest checks were impaled, the display of Joyva halvah bar and Wrigley’s gum, the cup of wooden toothpicks and the boxes of cigars in the case below.
Manny’s, of course, is still there, but the counter and photographs of local politicians on the walls are long gone.
