Modern Modes was a former dressmaker's shop in the New York City borough of Brooklyn at the address number 808 -- no street was mentioned in the novel. It was the residence of Gerald Anthony Grice, an unemployed man who, in the summer of 1975, kidnapped and murdered six-year-old Blair Roche.
Investigating the kidnapping, Rorschach traced Grice to Modern Modes, broke in and searched the premises, finding overwhelming evidence of Grice's crime; he had dismembered the girl's body using several butcher's tools, fed her to his dogs and had burned her clothes in a small wood stove. Rorschach killed Grice's two German shepards which had been running free on the fenced-in property. Rorschach waited for Grice to return home, trapped him in the house and set fire to it. Grice did not survive.[1]
