Day 1268

This store must have taken its name from the 168th Street terminal station of the Jamaica El, which stood here on Jamaica Avenue prior to its demolition in the late 1970s. A woman I spoke to inside couldn't confirm the name's origin, but she told me the store has been around for 60 years or so. A couple of Long Island Daily Press articles from 1933 and 1935 suggest the business may be even older, however, and the final survivor of a mini-empire of neighboring Terminal shops once located a few blocks away on what is now Guy R. Brewer Boulevard: Terminal Flower Market, Terminal Lingerie and Hosiery Shops, Terminal Pants Shop (where Fats Waller was a customer), and Terminal Wines & Liquors. (There was also once a Terminal Sea Food in the area.)