Walking around the Lower East Side of New York City’s Manhattan, there’s a good chance you won’t even pay a second glance to the decrepit sign (which is actually pretty awesome looking) that reads “Ideal Hosiery.”
In fact, if you don’t look closely you’ll probably assume it’s a vacant building, a venture that went out of business long ago. And that’s where you’d be wrong. Ideal Hosiery, a family-owned business since 1950, is a musty, packing box-filled shop and great place to shop for socks, and, on a Sunday afternoon, attend an Orthodox Jewish prayer session. While the block the business sits on was once called Hosiery Row, many of the businesses have now gone out of business. Ideal Hosiery is what remains of this piece of Manhattan heritage.
Ideal Hosiery is located at 339 Grand Street in Manhattan.
Jessica Festa is the editor of the travel sites Jessie on a Journey (http://jessieonajourney.com) and Epicure & Culture (http://epicureandculture.com). Along with blogging at We Blog The World, her byline has appeared in publications like Huffington Post, Gadling, Fodor’s, Travel + Escape, Matador, Viator, The Culture-Ist and many others. After getting her BA/MA in Communication from the State University of New York at Albany, she realized she wasn’t really to stop backpacking and made travel her full time job. Some of her most memorable experiences include studying abroad in Sydney, teaching English in Thailand, doing orphanage work in Ghana, hiking her way through South America and traveling solo through Europe. She has a passion for backpacking, adventure, hiking, wine and getting off the beaten path.
