Since yesterday’s newsletter ended with the kosher dairy restaurants of old Jewish New York, it seems fitting that today’s should end with the grocery stores. Jenna Weissman Joselit writes:
In 1902 . . . residents of the Lower East Side and other hard-hit Jewish neighborhoods throughout the greater New York area took to the streets in protest what they took to be the exorbitant cost of kosher meat, then a household staple for many. . . . On the Lower East Side in 1913, . . . 259 grocers, 216 butchers, 56 fruit dealers, 30 fish dealers, 19 herring dealers, and seven butter-and-egg dealers turned to the Hebrew Free Loan Society for financial help.
Also in 1902, the New York Sun sent a journalist to investigate this vibrant Jewish immigrant neighborhood:
What fascinated the Sun reporter most of all was the centrality of food to the local landscape. Everywhere he turned, he’d happen upon someone or something purveying some sort of comestible. “Every other store and street stand is devoted to foodstuffs,” he observed, wondering if those who called Orchard, Houston, and Grand streets home ever “ceased eating.” Row after row of grocery stores, their wares displayed every which way; butcher shops, whose windows with their dead chickens hanging from a string resembled an “execution ground”; and bakeries, whose strangely shaped loaves gave its windows a “fantastic foreign appearance” vied with numerous pushcarts and stationary street stands to fill a “land so unknown to the mass of the rest of the population that it might as well be Siberia.”
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/rise-jewish-grocers