On the appointed day, the store was filled with customers, but eighty-seven-year-old Ruth Tanenbaum Shapiro (“Call me Ruthie”) was easy to pick out of the crowd. When I offered to pay Ruthie back for her cab ride from her apartment on the Upper West Side, she said, “What cab? I came by subway.” When asked if she’d like to sit down and have something to eat, her response was “Maybe later.”
Thirty minutes into our conversation, I needed to sit down and have something to eat. I opened two folding chairs in the front of the store near the herring showcase. We noshed a bissel halvah while she reminisced about life on the Lower East Side from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Of course I knew your mother, Annie, and your aunts, Hattie and Idie. They worked in their father’s store and I worked in my father’s bakery, two doors away. If they were very busy, I would help them out and take herrings from the barrels and wrap them in newspaper for the customers.
I began working in my father’s bakery when I was six years old. We lived on the second floor, right above the store. Only my father and I knew how to make change. We sold bread for six cents a pound and rolls for a few pennies each. Where I live now, bread is three to four dollars a loaf and the rolls are seventy-five cents each. Can you believe it? Bread was delivered to us and came in one-, two-, four-, and eight-pound loaves for the rye, up to twelve pounds for the pumpernickel. We cut the big loaves in half and then cut a wedge from the half. The customer would show us with her hands how big a wedge she wanted. If someone was having a party and wanted sliced bread, I sliced it by hand with a knife. My father finally gave in and bought a slicing machine. The wheel was turned by hand. He didn’t buy an electric slicer until much later. It was very loud and made the whole store shake. My father was a religious man, very conservative at home and in business. He didn’t like to make changes.
One Sunday my mother was helping out in the store. She put her hand on the wrong side of the slicing machine and it cut off the tips of two fingers. I put her fingertips in a towel and rushed her over to Dr. Isaacs’s home. Since he was a customer, I knew where he lived. He was the biggest doctor at Beth Israel Hospital. He was a surgeon and he would do all the important operations. He even operated on his own son. There were no specialists in those days. He would operate on all parts of the body: the head, the stomach, the feet. He was a bit meshuggah but the biggest, the best. So he let us into his house and he sewed on my mother’s fingertips right there. A beautiful job. Like new. And he didn’t charge us a dime. From everybody else he demanded payment in advance. After that, whenever he came into our store I dropped everything to take care of him. And if he wanted some fish from Russ next door, I would take him in and tell them to take care of him right away. Ask your mother and your aunt. They’ll know him. Dr. Isaacs. Beth Israel. The biggest!
We also sold bagels and bialys. Bagels were three for a nickel. We had cakes—sponge, honey, cheesecake, mun, mandelbrot, and checkerboard—at fifteen cents a pound. Cookies, Danish, jelly doughnuts, and kichlach were twenty-five cents a pound. After shul, people would eat a piece of herring and a kichel instead of bread. If they ate bread they had to wash their hands, say the blessing over the bread, and then the blessing after. The kichlach were made with fruit juice and weren’t considered bread, so they could avoid making the extra blessings. For breaking the fast on Yom Kippur we sold a lot of pumpernickel from Stumann’s bakery. Stumann’s was German, not Jewish; Jews weren’t allowed to eat bread that had been baked by other Jews during the fast day.
Everything you needed was right on your block. On the corner was Ershowsky’s. They sold meats and poultry, but they were not kosher. In the window were trays of turkey tails; those were very popular. During holidays they cooked whole turkeys, twenty-five at a time, in a big gas oven at the back of the store. Each cooked turkey was carved on a machine; then the meat was put back on the frame and covered with the skin. You couldn’t even tell it had been carved. They sold a lot of these turkeys to the unions, which gave them out as gifts. When a customer wanted a cut of fresh meat, she would put on a white butcher’s coat and accompany the worker—they had fifteen people working in the store—into a big walk-in refrigerator with sawdust on the floor. The meat was hanging from big hooks and they cut it for the customer right there. Besides fresh meat, the store made and sold pickled tongue and corned beef, smoked pastrami, salami, and frankfurters.
Leo and Harry were two boys who worked for Old Man Ershowsky. The old man got tired and sold the store to them. I married Leo in 1946. My father, who was kosher, wasn’t happy that his son-in-law sold trayfe. My father was concerned that people would think that he was eating trayfe from his son-in-law. But he liked Leo. Leo was a nice Jewish boy from the neighborhood, and he spoke a good Yiddish. What’s not to like? After we got married, we moved in with Leo’s mother on Second Street just across Houston, and we lived there for ten years until we moved uptown in the mid-1950s. I’m still in the same apartment at Central Park West and Ninety-second Street. I have eight rooms, with four bathrooms. It overlooks the park. I live there alone. Lots of people moved from the Lower East Side to Forest Hills, but Leo didn’t want to commute too far. He worked all the time.
Next to Ershowsky’s was Eisenberg’s appetizing store. I think he worked for your grandfather for a while. Right next to your grandfather’s place, in the same building, there was another commission bakery, Baskin’s. They were like us but even smaller. Tillie Baskin wanted her son to marry my sister; it didn’t happen. After Baskin’s was your grandfather’s store. Each morning Ivan rolled out the herring barrels to put on the street in front of the store. Your grandfather got Ivan from the Bowery. I remember the Russ girls, Hattie, Idie, and Annie. They were all very pretty. They worked very hard. We all worked hard. That’s what we had to do in those days. I remember seeing your great-uncle with his long beard and black coat and hat. He would sit in the front of the store and watch. He was the watcher. My father once told me that before the girls came in full-time, your grandfather had two young men working in the store. They had pegged pants. My father said to your grandfather in Yiddish, “Russ, these boys will never let you make a living. You should bring your daughters into your business.” And your grandfather said, “My daughters sell herring for a living? Never!” But then they did. And their husbands, too. [I ran this by Aunt Hattie, who doesn’t remember anyone working behind the counter at that time other than Harry Eisenberg. And she says that her father always expected his daughters to come into the business. I guess everyone is entitled to a little literary license.]
In between your store and our bakery, there was a dairy store that sold eggs, milk, and butter. It was tub butter; they cut chunks of butter from a big block. Customers brought in their own bottles, and the milk was ladled out of a large metal can. Buttermilk was three cents a glass. And cheeses: farmer’s cheese, pot cheese, American cheese; nothing fancy like now. Later on, they sold baked farmer’s cheese with fruits and nuts and raisins.
On the other side of our store was a deli called Leibowitz and Klein that sold pastrami, corned beef, and tongue sandwiches and hot dogs. A sandwich was ten cents. Then it became Henry’s, after the war, I think. When the landlord raised the rent, Henry moved his delicatessen to the next block.
On each street corner there were pickle vendors who sold sours, half sours, and pickled tomatoes from barrels. They paid rent to shopkeepers to store their pickle barrels at night. In the street in front of the stores there were pushcarts. I remember the pushcart directly in front of your store. The peddler sold onions and potatoes. No one could get over it when his daughter married a son of Yavarkovsky, the paper-goods dealer on Ludlow Street. Hoo-ha!
Across the street on the corner was a tiny candy store where you could get sodas with seltzer and different flavored syrups. They were the best sodas because the lady made the syrups herself. Next to the candy store was a mushroom store. Everyone used mushrooms in those days. Mostly for soups. And next to the mushroom store was a dairy restaurant, Shw
ebel’s, where you could get blintzes, pierogi, soup, and fruit with sour cream. And on the corner of Ludlow and Houston was Katz and Tarowsky’s delicatessen. [It’s now known as Katz’s, but it is no longer owned by the original family.]
Around the corner on Orchard Street there was another appetizing store: Nathan’s. Farther down Orchard, maybe between Stanton and Rivington, there was another one, Gartenberg’s. His son wanted to be a doctor, but they weren’t accepting many Jewish boys into medical schools in those days. So Gartenberg sent his son to Europe to school.
On Orchard Street there were lots of poultry stores. Most people bought a whole chicken and plucked the feathers themselves. If they wanted the poultry man to pluck the chicken, they had to pay an extra fifteen cents. And Orchard Street was filled with pushcarts. It wasn’t fancy. It was the bottom. Clinton Street, that was a better street. They had fancier stores selling clothing; they were up-to-date.
When our talk was over, I offered to put Ruthie into a cab to go home.
“What cab? I don’t need a cab. Don’t waste your money. I’ll go by bus. I’m from the old school.”
The Dark-er-est Days
My cousin Marty says that one day in the late 1940s he was standing with Grandpa Russ outside the Russ & Daughters building, which Grandpa had just bought. He heard Grandpa say “Oy.”
“What’s the matter, Grandpa? Are you sorry you bought the building?”
“No,” Grandpa replied. “I’m sorry I didn’t buy more of them.”
Grandpa, like many Eastern European Jews who were denied the right to own land in the Old Country, equated success with property ownership. He had no idea and did not foresee how bad things would get.
The 1950s brought a sea change of demographics to the Lower East Side. Over the course of the decade, most of the Jewish families, including the Russes, moved out of the neighborhood. Those who remained were either too poor to leave, too committed to their synagogues, or too attached to their elderly parents, who wanted only to live out their lives in the old neighborhood—whatever it was becoming. William Levitt was building suburban tract homes at low prices on Long Island. Robert Moses was building roads and highways that made it easy to commute to them. And the federal and state governments financed everything. The New York City rent control laws of 1943 were designed to protect tenants from excessive rent increases. Instead, the laws drove more landlords to abandon properties; there was no point in making costly repairs or renovations if they couldn’t increase rents. Those who kept their tenements began to replace the departing Jews with new arrivals to the city—blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans. Where large tracts of tenement slums were torn down, low-income public housing projects were erected.
A few newly created islands of middle-class life offered some stability. Not-for-profit, cooperative-style high-rise apartment buildings were built along Grand Street and East Broadway, with funds from unions such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and the support of the federal and state governments. They were intended for the benefit of union workers, but as inexpensive as this subsidized housing was, it was still too costly for most of them. For the most part, the apartments in those buildings were filled with merchants and professionals who had grown up in the tenements and couldn’t bring themselves to abandon the neighborhood. But the lion’s share of federal, state, and city funds went toward the construction of low-income housing projects. The dreams of Grandpa Russ and his fellow merchants to have the neighborhood become a bedroom community for Wall Street and the Financial District came to nothing.
While many local merchants moved their families out of the neighborhood, they held on to their stores because their customers continued to come back to shop, especially on the weekends. The Sunday blue laws, which restricted retail shopping on Sundays throughout the state, specifically exempted Lower East Side shops. This was the lifeline for neighborhood merchants. On Sundays there were often long lines outside Orchard Street’s discount handbag, designer clothing, and underwear shops. Uptown and out-of-town women waited to get into some of the stores, and once in, they got right into the spirit of the neighborhood as they tried on the latest fashions in the back of stores that had never heard of dressing rooms. Then they walked over to Grand Street to stock up on linens, towels, slipcovers, curtains, and other dry goods. Bargains abounded on the Lower East Side.
And after all that shopping, the bargain hunters had to get something to eat. Perhaps something dairy—blintzes, mushroom barley soup, kasha varnishkes, or latkes—at Ratner’s, Galishoff’s, or the Grand Dairy. Or maybe some deli—a hot dog, a corned beef or pastrami on rye, a salami or a tongue sandwich—from Katz’s, Henry’s, Crown, or Bernstein’s. Then over to Russ & Daughters, Scotty’s, J&J, or Saperstein to take home some herring and lox. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s there were still lots of choices for shoppers. Today, only Katz’s, Russ & Daughters, and Yonah Schimmel on Houston Street, and Noah’s Ark on Grand Street remain.
In the 1970s, the advent of the suburban mall with its huge parking lots, enclosed climate-controlled shopping, and fast-food outlets meant that the customers could trade in their nostalgic shopping trips to the Lower East Side for convenience. In 1976 the Sunday blue laws ended, allowing retailers everywhere to be open on Sundays. The first department store to take advantage of this change was E. J. Korvette, one of the original discounters of appliances and other items. This was the final blow for the merchants of the Lower East Side. Fewer and fewer customers came to the neighborhood. Some shopkeepers relocated their stores to the suburbs to be closer to their customers. But if they had grown old and tired in their stores and had no “next generation” to take over, they simply closed their businesses and moved to Florida.
“Why don’t you move your business uptown, where your customers are?” I was often asked during this period.
My standard reply: “Sooner or later, uptown will move downtown.”
It was just a response. I didn’t believe the neighborhood would ever change. So why didn’t we move our shop uptown or out of Manhattan? Because we owned the building, and moving would mean paying rent to a “stranger.” The unchallenged truth in the Russ family: “Once a landlord sees you doing business, he wants to become your partner.” And I knew in my kishkes (guts) that we were historically in our rightful place in the world. Would a herring really taste like a herring if it was bought on the Upper East Side or in Great Neck?
Although the low-income public housing built in the 1950s and ’60s did clear away the worst of the slums, it didn’t solve all of the problems of this new generation of poor immigrants. Light manufacturing was disappearing from New York, the municipal government was cutting back on its blue-collar jobs, and the departure of the small businesses further depleted the working-class job pool. It wasn’t hard to figure out that crime would soon follow, and it did. Then came the drug dealers, who openly sold their wares in the empty lots and abandoned tenements to both local residents and users who came from all over the city.
During the 1970s and ’80s, the neighborhood looked like a war zone. The storekeepers who stayed hunkered down and installed solid, roll-down metal security gates so that no one could look inside. Russ & Daughters installed gates with a see-through diamond-shaped pattern so passersby could look into the store when it was closed. It wasn’t like we were selling designer shoes or handbags. Who would want to break into a fish store?
Customers who still came to shop on the Lower East Side had their cars broken into because they had left a briefcase on the front seat or a radio in the dashboard; this was an engraved invitation to a junkie needing a fix. To combat shoplifting and pickpocketing, we created a code so as not to frighten the customers: “Two-ten!” an employee would shout. That meant keep your two eyes on the ten fingers of the unsavory-looking type standing too close to the pocketbook of the well-dressed lady from the Upper East Side who’s too busy watching her salmon being sliced to notice him. The bocce cou
rt across the street—formerly a favorite spot for Italians from nearby Little Italy—had turned into a “needle park” where junkies met their pushers. The prostitutes over on Chrystie Street picked up their johns and took them to the abandoned “trick house” a few doors away from our store, or serviced them right in the guys’ cars parked on the street. Occasionally a hooker, her sheepish-looking john in tow, would come into the store to get change for a hundred-dollar bill so she could get paid her ten bucks. Sometimes the same john would come flying into the store a few minutes later, hysterical, wanting to know if we saw his “date,” because she took the other ninety dollars while he was sleeping. We got to know some of the local hookers, who would buy candy from us. They all seemed to have a sweet tooth.
Despite the petty crimes and graffiti, Russ & Daughters remained relatively unscathed by the crime that pervaded the neighborhood. The one big theft we had was an inside job: a considerable amount of money was stolen by one of our employees, someone whom I had considered a trusted worker for many years. After that I became a true New York cynic, both to the world outside and the world inside our little store. But Russ & Daughters stayed put.
Some neighborhood merchants were not so fortunate. One well-known longtime Orchard Street leather-goods shop had two partners. Partner A had two sons, the older of whom he took into the business. That son couldn’t get along with partner B and opened his own store across the street. The younger son became a drug addict, readily supplied by the neighborhood pushers. Over the years, we watched as the young man’s addiction worsened and the father’s many expensive attempts to have him cleaned up in rehab failed. The father created an account with us so that his son could come in and buy something to eat: a bagel and lox, maybe some sturgeon every once in a while. We had to tell his father that this wasn’t working. The son charged fancy and expensive canned goods, olive oils, and jars of caviar to sell on nearby streets and then used the proceeds for a fix. After several years, the father’s persistence seemed to pay off. The son returned from another trip to rehab, and this time he was clean. He dressed in suits and ties, put on some weight, and spoke in complete and lucid sentences. The father was pleased and took the son into his business. All seemed to be going well. Then, one night while I was watching the evening news, I saw the son in a “perp walk.” He had hired a hit man to kill partner B. The hit man, however, was an undercover cop. Not long after his arrest, the son died in jail. The leather-goods store, a beloved shopping destination featured in many guidebooks, eventually closed.
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