The word “appetizing,” as in “appetizing store,” has no known foreign origin. Stores specializing in smoked, cured, and pickled fish did not exist in Eastern Europe. The local fishmonger sold pike and carp for the Sabbath and salt herring for during the week; housewives took it from there. In America, newly available fish, such as whitefish, sable, and salmon—which along with the familiar herring lent themselves to smoking, curing, and pickling—gave rise to a new type of establishment: the “appetizing store,” where mouthwatering (“appetizing”) prepared food was sold.
Delicatessens, on the other hand, did make the journey from Old World to New World. Germans, who settled on the Lower East Side in the mid-1800s, brought the delicatessen concept with them. The neighborhood was even known for a time as Kleine Deutschland (Little Germany). But before long these upwardly mobile merchants and tradesman moved their community to the Upper East Side, beating a quick retreat before the onslaught of the “wretched refuse” that were the Eastern European Jews. That was okay with the new immigrants, so long as the delicatessens, under different ownership, stayed in the neighborhood.
From the 1920s through the end of World War II, there were twenty to thirty appetizing stores on the Lower East Side. Many owners shared Grandpa Russ’s career trajectory—from pushcart to store. But none that I know of, save for Russ & Daughters, made it past the second generation. They weren’t designed to. No one wanted their kids in the business.
Russ’s Cut Rate Appetizing
I recently asked Aunt Hattie if she remembered anything of her father’s first store at 187 Orchard Street. “Do you know,” I asked, “why your father called it Cut Rate Appetizing?”
“I can’t imagine,” replied Aunt Hattie. “There were lots of appetizing stores on the Lower East Side. And prices were cheap as borscht. Maybe lox was seven or eight cents a quarter pound. And no one bought a quarter pound, anyway. They bought a halbe fiertel [an eighth of a pound]. So I don’t know what rate they could cut. A lot of the customers did try to bargain, but Papa wouldn’t allow it. He posted the prices, and that’s what they paid. Papa never did well with the customers.
“Papa opened the store in 1914. It was very dark. It was very small. No refrigeration. There were wooden herring barrels outside. I don’t know how they got there every day. We lived in one room in the back of the store. When my sister Ida was born, we moved to an apartment in the tenement across the street. We walked up to the fourth floor. It was very dark. It was very hot in the summer. We spent a lot of time on the fire escape to stay cool. The bathroom was in the hallway. The bathtub was in the kitchen.
“I started helping Papa in the store on weekends when I was eight years old. I have a memory of Papa having a horse and wagon. Maybe he had used it for deliveries. I remember sitting up on the wagon with him. But I don’t know where he got the horse and wagon from, where he kept it, or what he did with it.”
Berger’s Amphibious Steed
Grandpa Russ bought the store in 1914 from the previous owner, Isaac Berger. In The New York Times of September 11, 1911, there’s a story titled “Berger’s Amphibious Steed.” According to the Times, one Isaac Berger owned a smoked-fish business at 187 Orchard Street and a horse named Chestnut. All winter long, Berger and Chestnut would deliver smoked fish to East Side customers. “Then when summer came,” the article recounts,
Chestnut together with the other members of the Berger family went splendidly to the seashore and sniffed the cool and restful breezes of the ocean when he faced it, and of smoked fish when he faced the other way. For Berger mingles business with pleasure and opened a summer trade in smoked fish at 526 Boulevard, Rockaway Beach.
The brightest hour in Chestnut’s life at the seashore and the proudest in Berger’s was at four o’clock each afternoon, when, leaving smoked fish and business cares on shore behind them, both swam out into the surf. Berger was the only one of all the bathers who had the proud distinction of breasting the waves with a dashing steed.
“Aunt Hattie,” I asked, “do you remember the name of the horse your father had?”
“No.”
“Does the name Chestnut mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Did you ever hear your father mention a horse that swims?”
“What, are you crazy? A horse that swims? Whoever heard such a thing?”
Moving the Store and the Family
In 1923 Joel Russ moved his store around the corner to 179 East Houston Street. This location had been a storage space that Grandpa Russ shared with Hagel, his landsman (someone from the same area in Europe) and partner in the imported-mushroom business. Dried mushrooms from Poland were a staple in those days. They had a rich, earthy taste and were used in soups and sauces instead of meat, which was too expensive for many tenement dwellers. Due to a falling out between the two men, Grandpa Russ was able to take over the space and open J. Russ Cut Rate Appetizing. It was a small store, on one side of the street level of a six-story tenement building, no more than sixteen feet wide and forty feet deep. There were floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors that made the store unbearably hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. When the weather was good, the doors were removed and the large wooden herring barrels were dragged from the back of the store out to the street. There was no bathroom in the store; it was located in the hallway of the residential part of the building. Sheets of newspaper were left to be used as toilet paper.
The Lower East Side of the 1920s was crowded, dirty, and poor, and the mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants left as soon as they earned enough money to live in the newly constructed apartment buildings and houses in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The period after World War I was one of economic expansion for the city. The subway system now linked Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens with Manhattan, making the outer boroughs ideal areas for families to live, while the family breadwinners commuted to the jobs and businesses they kept on the Lower East Side.
Street scene in front of 179 East Houston Street
(on the left, in the foreground) in 1929, looking toward First Avenue
Grandpa Russ joined that exodus. There were short-lived forays into Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Corona, Queens. But in 1926 he was able to move his wife and daughters to a two-family house at 715 Avenue O, in the Flatbush/Midwood section of Brooklyn. He had to take out two mortgages. Grandma Russ finally embraced life in America. She had two kitchens—one for baking, the other for cooking—and a large garden where she grew flowers and vegetables. The Russ girls were happy because each had her own room, attended good schools, and made new friends. My mother even had some boyfriends. And Grandpa Russ was happy. He had landsleit in the neighborhood, two cronies from Strzyzov who frequently came over on Friday nights to laugh and tell stories. And one day he brought home a German shepherd named Buddy, to whom he told jokes in Yiddish. He swore that the dog laughed at his jokes.
Living in Brooklyn meant Grandpa Russ had to leave the house at 3:30 every morning to go by foot, trolley car, and BMT elevated subway line first to the smokehouses and then to his store. He had very bad feet. He would say, “Fees, oyb de kinst nisht, ubba ich loz dich du” (Feet, if you’re not coming, I’ll leave you here). But he knew that living in Brooklyn was better for his family.
Vi Nempt Men Parnosa?
One day in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, two representatives from the banks that held the two mortgages on the Brooklyn house came to visit Grandpa Russ.
“Mr. Russ,” they said, “your store or your house?”
Grandpa Russ chose to keep the store. His wife and daughters pleaded with him; they were happy in Brooklyn and didn’t want to return to the Lower East Side. He replied with what had become his constant refrain: “Vi nempt men parnosa?” From where do we take our living? He meant that it was more important to hold on to the store because that was the source of the family’s income.
The five Russes moved to a dark, dreary ground-floor apartment complete with cockroaches in a
tenement on Second Street and Avenue A. But they didn’t stay there for long, thanks to Cousin Sylvia, daughter of Tante Pepe, Bella’s sister. Bella and Pepe didn’t get along and rarely spoke to each other, even though they lived just a few blocks apart. According to my mom, it was jealousy, pure and simple. Bella married Joel, who had his own store and his daughters in the business. Pepe married a barber. But the barber was able to use his connections—his customers—to get his children good civil-service jobs, which was no easy feat during the Depression. Cousin Sylvia worked for the Board of Health, and she was able to have the Russes’ apartment condemned for roach infestation, allowing Grandpa Russ to break the lease.
He then moved the family to the Ageloff Towers. Completed in 1929, the Ageloff was marketed at the time as “the Lower East Side’s first luxury building.” And indeed it was. Covering the entire block from Third to Fourth Streets on Avenue A, the two twelve-story apartment houses were built in art-deco style, which was then the height of architectural fashion. They offered “all modern conveniences,” including doormen with white gloves, elevators, both hot and cold running water, and indoor plumbing, all in sharp contrast to the surrounding cold-water six-story walk-up tenements. The offering brochure also touted the multitude of transportation alternatives: “At the door are the 14th Street and 8th Street Crosstown Street Cars. Nearby are the Inter-borough, the B.M.T., the Second and Third Avenue Elevated …” But the availability of transportation was not critical to Grandpa Russ. He and the rest of the Russes simply walked the few blocks to the store. But then a new problem arose. The Second Avenue elevated line was dismantled, and the street right in front of the store underwent a massive excavation to create the new Independent Subway Line. The work lasted for several years, and the hardship it created for all the businesses on East Houston Street was worse than the problems brought on by the Depression. It was almost impossible to get people or merchandise into the store. I was curious about how Grandpa Russ could afford to move the family into such a fancy building at the height of the Depression and in the middle of the East Houston Street excavation. My mother provided the answer.
“We all lived in the five-room apartment,” she said. “Mama and Papa had one bedroom. Ida and her husband, Max, and their new baby, Lolly, were in another. Hattie and Murray and their new baby, Nina, used the living room as their bedroom. And I slept in the dining room with the maids.”
“You had maids?” I was shocked to hear this. It didn’t fit in with the image of my struggling immigrant family of fishmongers.
“Sure. Hattie and Ida were working full-time in the store with their husbands. I was going to Seward Park High School. Mama’s spirit and health had been broken by the move from the big house in Brooklyn back to the Lower East Side. Mama needed help with the babies, and with the cleaning and shopping. One maid was from Czechoslovakia. She didn’t speak any English, but Mama could communicate with her in some Slavic language. The other maid was from somewhere in the South. She spoke English, but none of us could understand her. And do you know what they got paid? Fifteen dollars a month! It was bilik vee borscht [cheap as borscht]. They were happy to have jobs, food, and a roof over their heads.”
The Pushcart Wars
The 1930s were a time of transition on the Lower East Side. When Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was elected in 1933, there were thousands of pushcarts in the neighborhood, selling everything from clothes to food to housewares. The mayor saw them as unsightly reminders of Old World living, and all the human traffic they brought with them made it difficult for police cars and fire trucks to get through the crowded streets. With federal money given to the city for job creation, La Guardia built several clean indoor markets throughout the city. The Essex Street Market at Essex and Delancey Streets opened in 1940 to house the pushcart vendors from Orchard Street, Hester Street, and the surrounding areas of the Lower East Side.
The pushcart controversy hit home. Grandma Russ loved to shop from the pushcarts in the streets, while Grandpa Russ organized with other storekeepers to modernize the neighborhood and push out the pushcarts. When Grandma Russ reminded Grandpa that he had once been a pushcart peddler himself, he said, very simply, “Sha!” (Be quiet!).
One by one, the Russ girls, all of whom had helped their father in his store on weekends, came to work there full-time, six days a week, as soon as they finished high school. After all, it was the Depression. Vi nempt men parnosa? Although Hattie, Ida, and Anne resented the loss of their youth, they also recognized the economic necessity. And their father recognized that they were good for business. He was a typical Eastern European immigrant, long on drive and short on patience, especially with customers. This was not a good attitude to have in retail. But the three young and pretty Russ daughters, with their arms up to their elbows in herring barrels or their hands deftly slicing lox, were able to charm and disarm the most difficult customer.
By 1935, with two of his daughters running his business right alongside him and the third soon to follow, Joel Russ renamed his store Russ & Daughters. Joel Russ wasn’t a feminist, but he recognized two things: first, that it was indeed his daughters who had helped him grow his business and keep his store; second, that the name Russ & Daughters would be a good marketing tool. Of the twenty or so other appetizing shops in the neighborhood, some were “So-and-So & Sons.” Only Joel Russ had a sign that read “& Daughters.” When his daughters married, their husbands worked in the store, too, and eventually became legal partners in the business. But the sign would never be changed.
Joel Russ and his daughters (left to right), Hattie, Ida, and Anne
The War: Good for Business
During World War II, Hattie’s husband, Murray, and Ida’s husband, Max, both avoided the draft. I never found out how; my aunts never said. My father, Herbie, was drafted into the U.S. Navy, where he was designated “Storekeeper 3rd Class,” a bit of ethnic typecasting by a navy that at the time was regarded by many as anti-Semitic. Herbie had thought he would be escaping, at least temporarily, from the world behind the counter. No such luck. But this may have saved his life. He was never shipped overseas. He eventually wound up in New Orleans, and then he was stationed in Texas. My mother went with him, and they were thankful for the hospitality of local Jewish families during holidays. My mother says the best challah she ever ate was in Fort Worth, Texas.
Anne and Storekeeper 3rd
Class Herbert Federman
Business boomed for Russ & Daughters during the war years. Due to rationing, it was difficult to obtain canned goods, but Grandpa Russ, ever resourceful, was able to procure canned tuna, salmon, and sardines. Customers knew that Mr. Russ had the merchandise. They entered the store, spoke quietly to Grandpa or Uncle Murray, and then were directed around the corner to a small warehouse. Customers pulled up in front of the warehouse, opened their car trunks, and cases were loaded directly into them. I was told by Aunt Hattie that some of the biggest customers (“doctors, lawyers, and even judges”) were buying Grandpa Russ’s black-market sardines.
Since the canned-goods business proved such a success, Grandpa and Uncle Murray headed to Maine, where they purchased a carload—a train carload—of Moosabec sardines, a well-known brand back then. But their timing was off. Soon after they took delivery, the war ended, and canned goods were once again readily available. The sardines stayed “on special, three for a quarter” for years. When I renovated the store in 1995, a thorough clearing of the basement unearthed eight cases of Moosabec sardines dated 1945. The cans were all swollen. They went into a Dumpster.
The Postwar Years
The period following World War II was one of great economic expansion in the United States, and the Russ family fully participated. While Grandpa Russ kept everyone working together in the store on the Lower East Side, he also joined the exodus from inner city to suburb and moved the entire family to Far Rockaway, Queens. The Russes had rented bungalows by the beach for several summers during the 1940s, but the move became permanent in 1949. Grandpa
Russ bought a big old two-story wood-frame house that contained two apartments—without telling anyone beforehand. He never told his family where or when the next move would be. “Papa had made up his mind,” the saying went. “Shoyn. Fartig” (That’s it. Decided).
Grandpa Russ, in an uncharacteristic display of affection,
and me, in front of one of the Hudson Commodores, sometime
in the early 1950s. Maybe he knew he was anointing
the heir to the herring throne.
My family lived on the first floor; Aunt Hattie, Uncle Murray, and their two kids, Nina and Paul, lived on the second floor. Grandpa and Grandma Russ occupied a cute red-shingled cottage next door. Aunt Ida and Uncle Max had left the business that year to strike out on their own in the world of appetizing. They moved to Far Rockaway, too, just a few blocks away from the family compound, with their two kids, Lolly and Martin.
Russ & Daughters Page 4
