On a recent long drive that took me back onto Route 17 in the Catskills, I was compelled to make a wellness check on an ailing roadside friend, the beautiful Litwin Pharmacy. 

Each time I visit, I find the remnants of this long-shuttered business look a little more shopworn, but the building’s evocative details, its stateliness, its inherent dignity, fill me with perpetual hope of a miracle remedy for a place that once healed the sick.

As I’ve written after earlier visits, this corner pharmacy in the hamlet of Parksville, New York, met the same fate that felled the area’s fabled resorts and bungalow colonies that attracted city dwellers each summer in the days before cheap jet travel and widely available air conditioning rendered the slog up north an anachronism. There’s no magic drug to cure what ails Litwin’s, yet it stands defiantly. 

It many admirers, as does Parksville itself. Indeed, Parksville was recently graced with a Borscht Belt Historical Marker encapsulating its history as a resort, abetted by a railroad that ran here into the early 1950s.

The building has lovely midcentury Coca-Cola privilege signage and near the top of the corner bay features a bas-relief representation of a mortar and pestle, a reminder of how it cared for the sick. But it also catered to the toddler enraptured by a toy, the tourist browsing through the postcards, the local chatting with friends. Today, it draws the nostalgic looking for ghosts.