Picture South Windsor - Then And Now

SOUTH WINDSOR, CT — The latest installment of our periodic informal series highlighting businesses from South Windsor's past takes us back exactly a quarter century - an entire generation back, in fact - to the 1995 South Windsor High School yearbook, The Centurion. Here we find an advertisement for a type of business that seems to have gone the way of powdered wigs and 8-track tapes: the New England Photo Co.

Located in a small shopping plaza at 855 Sullivan Ave., New England Photo provided full photographic services to its customers, but some of the words may seem unfamiliar to the teens of today's digital age: film (film?), batteries, developing (another long-lost art), reprints and frames.

Another relic of a bygone era can be seen on the far right edge of the photo, on the brick wall of Ann Fields Country Pie Restaurant: a pay phone (a what?) and accompanying directory (again - what?). Many a dime was spent on that germ factory, for local calls only of course. No such thing as unlimited long distance plans in those days; in fact, very few people even had cell phones at the time, though pagers were all the rage.

The site is currently home to Brooks, Todd & McNeil insurance counselors, as seen in this more contemporary photo from Google Maps.

Do you have a photo of an old South Windsor business which no longer exists, to which you own the rights and which we could feature in this column? Email tim.jensen@patch.com.

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