I cannot tell you if Al Horn Baking Equipment, a wholesaler in the Westchester Square area, is still in business. I can tell you that the ghosts of its plastic letter signs on its brick building at 1314 Cooper Avenue are still there. Cooper Avenue is a strange enclave indeed, as it runs for one block between Westchester and Fink Avenues, has no sidewalk with 1314 the only surviving address, with just a barbed-wire protected parking lot and a garage facing on it. This group of photos from 1940 prove that there had been a few dwellings and that 1314 was home to a live poultry market.
UPDATE: Horn went out of business in 2014.
This Street View from 2011 shows that 1314 still had some of the plastic letters hanging on for dear life, but they’ve since been stolen or dropped off since then.
I’ve always been attracted to the Westchester Square area, with its ancient churches and cemeteries, Huntington Library, dead ends and alleys, and rich history as the former seat of Westchester County (the Bronx was carved out of Westchester in stages in the 1800s, and Westchester Avenue was once the Southern Wetchester Turnpike).
HT: Gary Fonville
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12/21/21
10 comments
AL HORN, & SONS BAKERY EQUIPMENT CORP. was in business from May 7, 1962 until June 8, 2004.
al horn is no longer in business.
in fact, NYC has an affordable housing project planned that would remove “fink avenue” (probably for fink bread) and construct from the subway yard to blondell ave….
The streets in the area are named for early Westchester Square settlers in the 1600s and 1700s.
I remember the live poultry store. As a kid, I went in there with either my aunt or grandmother, and it smelled so bad. She picked out her poultry
and they took it in the back to wring it’s neck.
Suffice it to say, I never went back.
Fink Ave. has no connection to Fink Baking Company. The HQ for Fink Holdings is located in Scarsdale and the huge bakery was located on 58th St. & 53rd Ave in
LIC/Maspeth. We used to “liberate” bread off the delivery trucks.
Don’t know about the Maspeth Location but the main bakery recently was on 54th Ave between Vernon Blvd and 2nd St. Haven’t been down that way since I retired but I believe it’s closed.
My kind of neighborhood.
If its the Fink Bread Company the avenue is named for I remember their
trucks but never had their products.The sign painted on their trucks was:
FINK,then underneath that:”Means good bread” I imagine people were
always giving them crap about their name.
Hey Joe. How are you so PRECISE with the dates of operation?
“Hey Joe. How are you so PRECISE with the dates of operation?”
Simple. Just looking up the business records online.
“If its the Fink Bread Company the avenue is named for I remember their
trucks but never had their products.”
It’s not named after Fink Baking Company. Read my previous comment. Fink Avenue predates the bakery. If you ever had a
sandwich, burger, hot dog or toast at virtually any coffee shop or diner in the Tri-State area before 2002, you certainly did have
their products. Fink was the major supplier of baked products to nearly all of these establishments.
Thanx