There is a hardware store here that's been around probably 50+ years. I'm surprised they don't get in trouble because when you walk in there you are duckin and dodgin stuff everywhere, hanging from the ceiling and everything but it is pretty cool to see all the older stuff they have.
That reminds me of a hardware store that used to be in my small-town section here in Orlando. John's Hardware in College Park. Dark, dusty, old guys sitting around, but they had crap in there you'd never find in Home Depot, stuff like the pipe from a wall-mounted tank to a floor-mounted crapper, which I had in my first house. I don't mean the novelty brass ones you can buy with a high tank and pull chain. I mean one from around 1940. I was advised to just replace the toilet, by the way, as getting those pipes fitting precisely in the bottom of the tank and the back of the bowl without leaking was a challenge for a real plumber. There's still a store on the South Trail that's pretty close in "atmosphere" as it were, and with our rash of hurricanes about 8 years ago, that small store was performing miracles in terms of sourcing stuff to get people through the power outages, and they didn't screw people on the price.
