Cheap Charlie (candy store)

Entry in progress—B.P.
 
Google Books
Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang
By Jonathon Green
London: Cassell
2006
Pg. 266:
cheap charlie n.
[late 19C-1900s](US) a candy store.
 
Google Books
The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English
By Tom Dalzell
pg. 183:
cheap Charlie noun
a small, neighborhood candy store US, 1979
. Every street had a “Cheap Charlie.”—Samuel Chotzinoff, A Lost Paradise, p. 75, 1979
. One of the most popular amon the younger generations was the candy store, or “Cheap Charlie.” Every street had a “Cheap Charlie.”—Mario Maffi, Gateway to the Promised Land, p. 85, 1991
 
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
By Betty Smith
New York, NY: Harper & Brothers
1943
Pg. 9:
Cheap Charlie’s was the penny candy store next to Carney’s which catered to the junk trade. At the end of a Saturday, its cash box was filled with greenish pennies. By an unwritten law, it was a boys’ store.
(...)
Cheap Charlie was not cheap and his name wasn’t Charlie. He had taken that name and it said so on the store awning and Francie believed it. Charlie gave you a pick for your penny.
 
Google Books
The City in Slang:
New York Life and Popular Speech
By Irving Lewis Allen
New York, NY: Oxford University Press
1993
Pg. 101:
The candy store is another New York institution and it usually included a soda fountain. On the Lower East Side between about 1890 and the First World War the candy stores were also called cheap charlies and served as social centers of Jewish life. THe candy store in fact sold more newspapers, magazines, tobacco, an egg creams than candy.