You could not help but be charmed, passing by 110 Market, by the shiny cardboard hearts packed with handcrafted butter creams, the Christmas smorgasbords, and chocolate Easter eggs of ostrich dimension.
But to Shane, the windows had a more rueful story. Back in the late 1970s, he volunteered, they were gracious wraps, the glass leaded and curving.
Then a derelict threw a brick through one, and Shane's father Edward hired a company to install a steel grate to protect them.
But the worker's ladder slipped and - you wouldn't believe it! - crashed through the remaining intact window.
So much for the beautiful curved windows. Until now. "The Berleys have already ordered new ones," he said.
They are planning to refit and reopen the threadbare, four-story building in the fall (under the Shane name), extending their warm-season ice cream business with a line of old-school holiday candy.
Year after year, the city's once-prolific candy-manufacturing scene has been giving up the ghost. So too with most of the mom-and-pop candy shops (though Lore's at Seventh and Chestnut lives on, and new-school artisans have emerged - John & Kira's, and Éclat among them).
Then four years ago, Young's Candies near 28th and Girard went dark when master craftsman Harry Young died, dropping the curtain on the era of hand-pulled candy canes, fragile walnut pillows, and the intricate, sugar-candy clear toys - molded into the busts of presidents and sailing ships, lumbering elephants and dashing firemen - that had sparkled under Christmas lights here for more than a century.
But that's where the story of Shane's Past - the last of the oldest Mohicans - and the story of Shane's Future began, coincidentally, to intersect.
