Day 1328

I took this photo outside Dell’s Maraschino Cherries in Red Hook. Dell's was in the news a few years ago when a couple of local beekeepers discovered that their bees' honey, not to mention their bees' stomachs, had turned "an alarming shade of Robitussin" — if you can even use the word "honey" to describe "a red concoction that tasted metallic and then overly sweet". Meanwhile, unusually large numbers of bees had been seen buzzing around the cherry factory...

Dell's made headlines again more recently, in a much more tragic fashion, when the head of the company shot and killed himself after a team of investigators, visiting the factory on an unrelated matter, began to suspect he was secretly growing marijuana here. As it turns out, he was, big time. His basement farm was "the largest indoor marijuana growing operation any of the investigators had ever seen in New York City".