Pick up a video rental at Strawberry Fields and you might stumble upon Ghosthustler, an electronica trio mixing beats in the back of the cramped store.
About four hours earlier, his killer, who had caused problems for several months by shoplifting and selling crack inside the cramped store, came in and demanded that he be allowed to sell drugs there, an investigator said.
Neither Patz nor Chelsea Altman, now 42, remembered Hernandez from the grocery store, a tiny, cramped shop with a "No Dogs" sign on the glass door and goods piled high against the windows.
Averaging 8,500 square feet, the cramped D'Agostino stores, like other city supermarkets, generally have narrow aisles that invite shopping-cart gridlock.
Smack in the middle of the cramped, packed stores hawking shark's fins, bird's nests, fossils, precious stones and sea slugs, a small gateway leads to the courtyard of the Leng Buai Ia shrine, where the noise of the outside bustle immediately falls away.
Beautiful and cramped, the store has graced a corner on 11th Street for a quarter-century.
Our streets are too narrow to accommodate separate lanes for cyclists, and our sidewalks are already too cramped to store their bikes.
"Our leaders are just toys," said Ashjan al-Akuli, an employee in a cramped computer store in Baghdad's Jamaa neighborhood.
The block's north end is anchored by a clutter of tattoo parlors and pornography stores, cramped together under blaring neon signs; a shuttered movie theater sits at its midpoint; another pornography shop perches at the block's southern edge.
Of all the changes coming to Francisco Baez's cramped corner grocery store in Newark's North Ward, he is most excited about the new scanner system at the two checkouts.
