A small soda-fountain opened on the corner in the spring of 1932. It had brass rails along the counter, a marble step at the door, and four stools that turned just slightly when a customer leaned on them. The neighborhood called it Cafe Sweets within a season — the name was painted in stepped art-deco letters above the awning, and at night the bulbs around the marquee made the whole sign glow like a small theater.

Through the depression and after, the recipe books were kept in a tin behind the cream machine — egg-cream syrup, soda water levels, the precise grind for the coffee, a list of names of children who came in on summer afternoons. The atrium glass that wraps the front of the shop today was added in 1957, when a small fire took out the original wooden facade. The new front was all glass and brass: a literal atrium where the light came through the leaves of a single ficus tree planted in a planter at the door.

The shop closed quietly in the late seventies, then was inherited by a granddaughter who, in 2003, did not so much restore it as reimagine it through the bright glass of the era she had grown up in: high-gloss, breathable, blue-green pearlescent. She kept the old 1932 marquee and the recipe tin. She added new glass shelves that look like floating ice. She kept the brass.

Today the atrium is a small bright room with the original brass counter, the ficus (now considerable), and a back wall hung with photographs of every regular who ever sat at the counter long enough for the photographer to ask a name. We are open from eight to seven, every day. There are still four stools.