FOLLOWING Sergey’s piece on the Marty Supreme set on Eldridge Street in December, I thought I would do a quick walk on Eldridge Street and its partner Forsyth, as I hadn’t seen those streets in their entirety before. The street runs from a junction at Forsyth and East Broadway north to East Houston Street. The streets in this part of town were laid out and built in the years following the War of 1812, and this street takes its name from Lt. Joseph Eldridge, who was killed in an 1814 battle in Canada by Native Americans led by the Ottawa chief, Blackbird, fighting on the British side.
In this photo, Eldridge Street and Forsyth Street come together in this photo taken from East Broadway. Unusually, since Eldridge’s house numbering begins at Division Street in the crosswalk ahead, the storefonts on the east side of Eldridge, seen at right, have East Broadway addresses.
Here’s the current map of the south ends of Eldridge and Fulton, with Eldridge beginning at East Broadway; Forsyth, meanwhile, has to bend to make way for the Manhattan Bridge (built from 1903-1909) and continues along its right of way as far south as Henry Street. However: no properties front on it south of East Broadway, and its house numbering also begins at Division Street.
Why Division? Note that on this 1891 map, that Division, laid out along the line of the old Rutgers and DeLancey properties, divides Lower East Side street layouts, and Eldridge and Fulton began there and were parallel, never joining. Note that Bayard Street, which extended all the way to Division Street, has since been cut back by the Confucius Plaza Houses and the Manhattan Bridge approach and today gets no further east than the Bowery.
I’m not sure if it was on this narrow building at Eldridge and Division…probably wasn’t because of the windows.. but I remember as kid, riding the subway over the Manhattan Bridge with either parent, there was this huge, and I mean huge, ad for GGG Clothes. I remember it because they used the General Mills script G. Today there seems to be no trace of GGG Clothes.
Here are the two buildings at Eldridge and Division in the same shot.
Towering above the surrounding tenement buildings, which seem to crouch around it in homage, is the Eldridge Street Synagogue, #12-#16 Eldridge. This was the first synagogue built in the Lower East Side by Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, who hired the architectural firm Herter Brothers, who completed it in 1887. The Eldridge Street Project restored the building slowly in the 2000s. From the exterior you can marvel at the Moorish architecture and stained-glass windows; the twelve roundels of the giant rose window represent the twelve tribes of Israel. Inside, note the centrally-located bimah, or reader’s platform, with its elaborate brass fixtures that were originally illuminated by gas, and the hand-carved walnut Ark of the Torah.
After years of decay, the building underwent a multimillion dollar restoration project and reopened as the Museum on Eldridge Street in December 2007. The Orthodox congregation still worships in the basement study hall.
The tenement, as in other parts of New York City, was the dominant form of housing with hundreds of people occupying rooms in the same building. Crowding, freezing cold in winter, and stifling heat in summer were the norm. Reform came only slowly, with the construction of major housing projects in the mid-20th Century. Eddie Cantor was born along this stretch of Eldridge between Division and Canal Streets.
Thankfully all buildings in the area have had heat and running water for some decades now.
Eldridge Street skirts the ever-expanding Chinatown and several buildings, like the Buddhist Association of New York at #20, liven up sometimes drab exteriors with pagoda-like decoration.
The corner walkup building at Canal and Eldridge used to host one of NYC’s iconic holdout diners: Cup & Saucer, which survived until 2014.
At Eldridge Street and Hester we come to a rather ridiculous schools complex that dominates a complete block and eliminated part of Forsyth Street, consisting of three schools, each of which has its own huge bay, or curved protuberance. I call it the Guggenheim of the Lower East Side.
The school housed here is called the Emma Lazarus School. Her sonnet honoring the Statue of Liberty was inscribed on a plaque placed on the statue’s granite pedestal in 1903. Though she passed by the statue on a ship while returning from Europe in 1887, a year after Liberty was dedicated, Lazarus (1849-1887) was too ill to actually see the “New Colossus” because of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which claimed her life at age 38. If you haven’t read it in school it’s a short and dramatic piece of poetry:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Also facing Hester at Forsyth is the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Intermediate, or Junior, High School. Sun (1866-1925) was the founder and first president of the first Chinese republic, after the 1911 overthrow of the dynastic system that had ruled China for millennia.
Other than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I can’t identify the two people on the mural. Comments are open.
According to Jim Naureckas in New York Songlines, Witty Brothers at #50-52 Eldridge “was a company — founded on Eldridge in 1888 — that sold elegant menswear from a handful of local stores. The famous gangster Monk Eastman was wearing a Witty Brothers suit when he was killed, which helped confirm his identity.”
A look at Witty Brothers when there was a vertical sidewalk sign as well as a huge neon billboard on the roof.
In 1939 Mr. Witty — along with his brothers Frederic, Ephraim and Arthur, and a cousin, Irving — took over a company founded by their grandfather David Witty in 1888. It started as one shop on Eldridge Street in Lower Manhattan. By the time it was taken over by the Eagle Clothes company in 1962, there were six stores, one in Brooklyn and five in Manhattan, including two on Fifth Avenue.
“They used luxurious fabrics, cashmere, Scottish tweeds,” said Mr. Witty’s daughter, Jane Gould, “and this was coming out of the Great Depression.” An article in The New York Times about the “Witty boys” in 1952 said it was their insistence on retaining the high quality of their forebears that kept the company afloat through the Depression.
Spencer Bernard Witty was born March 23, 1914, in Waccabuc, N.Y. He did not attend college. Like his brothers, he moved into the family business when he each reached the age of 21. Mr. Witty’s first wife, Henrietta Silberstein Witty, died in 1991. Besides his grandson Eric, of Madison, N.J., he is survived by his second wife, Cecile Rosenberg Witty; his daughter, Jane, of Warren, N.J.; and another grandson, Lance Gould, of Manhattan.
In 1967, five years after Witty Brothers was taken over by Eagle Clothes, Mr. Witty became a member of the board and vice chairman of the Merchants Bank of New York. In 1975 he became chairman of the bank, serving in that post until 2001, when it was acquired by Valley National Bank. [NY Times, 6/5/06]
A small, and I mean small, plaque at the entrance at #60 Eldridge marks it as the birthplace of Ira Gershwin, the lesser-known of classical/jazz/pop composers/lyricists George and Ira Gershwin. He was born in a different building in 1896. Together, the brothers collaborated on numerous songs and musicals that are continuously revived.
An unnamed public housing block fronting on Allen and “backing” on Eldridge, built in 1975, features an equally unnamed public park. I have begun to pay more attention to lampposts installed on private, or officially private, property such as this one. They are often unique and found nowhere else.
The former Talmud Torah Tifereth Jerusalem Yeshiva, #87 Eldridge, established in 1906, is identifiable by the Star of David above the arched windows.
Eldridge and Grand. I have noticed many signs in Chinese (Mandarin, most likely) in red and gold. This is not accidental:
In Chinese culture, red symbolizes fire, good fortune, and joy. It is the color of happiness, used strictly for celebrations. Unsurprisingly, gold symbolizes wealth and prosperity. Together, they are used to spread the message of good fortune and prosperity… [Sartle]
A rather nondescript 4-story building, #105-107 Eldridge north of Grand, wide enough for Fontana’s restaurant and other businesses, is actually one of the older buildings on the street. It was built in 1869 as the Eldridge Street Police Station, which occupied the building until 1912. It provided lodging for derelicts in unfortuanate conditions described by Jacob Riis.
I am drawn to red-painted buildings, like #111 Eldridge. Usually the signify present or past firehouses. Not the case here, though; instead, a teahouse.
A pair of “casually elegant” corner buildings at Eldridge and Broome Streets. (Had Robert Moses had his way, both would have probably been razed, as he wished to connect the Manhattan Bridge and the Holland Tunnel with the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have run above a widened Broome.)
No one can say for sure how the practice of tying sneakers together, running a wire across the street and throwing the shoes to hang from the wire started; but it’s a five-borough thing that has been done for decades.
It doesn’t look like it from the outside, but there are a pair of bars here at #134 Eldridge: wine bar Good Guy’s, and the speakeasy Attaboy:
Attaboy, on the Lower East Side, is one of the best cocktail experiences I have had in a long time. Our recent trip to New York was chock full of fantastic bars, but Attaboy was my favorite. I know it sounds pretty geeky, but it is truly hallowed ground in the world of cocktails.Attaboy opened 22 years ago replacing the original Milk & Honey, the ground-breaking speakeasy from cocktail pioneer Sasha Petraske. Milk and Honey won best cocktail bar in the world in 2008 and Attaboy won best bar in North America in 2022. [Yelp review]
I never drink anything stronger than beer, as I never got started with cocktails and at 67, it’s too complicated a world to enter at this point. I was attracted to the gold-leaf Tailors and Alterations lettering, left over from a long-ago tenant.
A pair of churches are side by side on Eldridge north of Delancey, the New York Chinese Alliance Church and the Sea of Galilee Temple in this once overwhelmingly Jewish realm; and an Islamic center can be found at #172. You would think the corner of Delancey and Eldridge would be prime real estate, but the Chinese church maintains a fenced-off empty lot, and tax photos from 1940 show nothing of note there even then. Next to the lot on Delancey was the now-demolished New Delancey Theatre.
170 Eldridge
I am having trouble with my photo gallery software, Imagely, so I will have to show these images one at a time. At #170, there’s something interesting going on with what’s probably a very old 3-story building. A painted sign above the door reads “Office of / S. Oppenheimer” and “S. Oppenheimer” according to 6sq.ft German immigrant Sigmund Oppenheimer was a sausage casing manufacturer whose company remained in business for over a century. The building itself goes back to the 1870s when painted type with serif lettering like this was common in signage.
The building doesn’t look like much from the exterior, but has sold for as much as $9.5M in the past.
University Settlement
University Settlement, Rivington and Eldridge, must be notable to get its own street sign. Quoting again directly from NY Songlines:
Originally known as the Neighborhood Guild, this was the country’s first settlement house–an institution founded on the premise that the poor needed the college-educated to settle in their midst and set a good example. The house moved here in 1899, into a building designed by John Mead Howells, who later co-designed the winning entry in the Tribune Tower competition, and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, author of the New Tenement Law and the classic history Iconography of Manhattan Island.
At University Settlement, Stokes’ brother, James Graham Phelps Stokes, met radical journalist Rose Pastor. The millionaire Episcopalian socialist’s 1905 marriage to Pastor scandalized the press, which called her the “Red Yiddish Cinderella.”
The newest grouping of buildings on Eldridge Street is the prosaically-named New York City Housing Authority Lower East Side Infill #1, public housing completed as late as 1988 between Stanton and Rivington Streets. They replaced walkup buildings similar to those seen previously on this page.
The NYCHA Hernandez Houses at Eldridge and Stanton St, opened in 1971, was named for Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernandez Marin. The views from the top floors must be enviable.
A pair of interesting murals can be found facing a parking lot at Stanton and Eldridge Streets. The older of the two is lengthwise across the bottom of its “mural” is by Antonio Garcia:
The mural in front of us features a watercolor-like row of smiling faces, an effect achieved by mixing aerosol spray paint with water. “There are three types of graffiti writers: graffiti criminals, graffiti vandals, and graffiti artists,” explains local graffiti artist Antonio “Chico” Garcia, who has been painting the neighborhood for 30 years and is helping lead our tour. “We focus on showing the art part.” This particular mural is part of an outreach program that shows kids how street art can be constructive, not destructive. [Inked Magazine]
The large “Stop Guns” mural is by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra, who has become NYC’s unofficial official muralist. His works depict 20th Century modern artists Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat; the Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie, on a housing project in north Jersey City, and Michael Jackson at 1st Avenue and East 11th Street. Kobra depicted Bob Dylan in Minneapolis, MN and Salvador Dali in Murcia, Spain. To date Kobra has painted 19 murals in NYC, some of which have already been obliterated.
Spaghetti Incident, an Italian restaurant at #231 Eldridge, references a 1993 Guns N’ Roses covers album, which in turn references…
an incident drummer Steven Adler had in 1989 while the band was temporarily staying at an apartment in Chicago. Adler stored his drugs in a refrigerator next to the band’s takeout containers, which contained Italian food. McKagan explained that Adler’s code word for his stash was ‘spaghetti’. In his lawsuit against the band, Adler’s lawyer asked the band to “tell us about the spaghetti incident,” which the band found amusing and used as the title of the album [wikipedia]
I have been mentioning commenting on parking lot lamps a bit more and across Eldridge from Spaghetti Incident are a grouping of these shiny cylindrical beauties. Don’t know the make.
A trio of painted murals can be found at the north end of Eldridge at East Houston.
En route to Forsyth for the trip back south, which will be on a future Forgotten NY post, I happened upon Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery is a longtime Houston Street tenant between Forsyth and Eldridge, emblematic of the old Jewish dominace of the Lower East Side.
Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery is a bakery and restaurant, located at 137 East Houston Street (between First Avenue and Second Avenue), in the Lower East Side, Manhattan, that has been selling knishes on the Lower East Side since 1910 from its original location on Houston Street.
While the painted sign is some decades ago it wasn’t here in 1940, but there was a large illuminated vertical sign in place.
Yonah was a Romanian rabbi who opened a pushcart with his wife in Coney Island in 1890.There they became famous for the potato and kasha dumplings known as knishes (the “K” is pronounced). In 1910, Schimmel went into business with his cousin Joseph Bergerand opened the store that still sits on East Houston Street.
Over the decades, many notable fans have come by for a knish, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Barbara Streisand and Woody Allen, who filmed a scene from “Whatever Works” here with Larry David.
Today the shop, which is the last remaining knish bakery in Manhattan, is owned by Yonah’s great nephew, remaining a family business.
As cited in The Underground Gourmet, a review of Yonah Schimmel’s in a collection of restaurant reviews by Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder, “No New York politician in the last 50 years has been elected to office without having at least one photograph showing him on the Lower East Side with a knish in his face.”
As the Lower East Side has changed over the decades and many of its Jewish residents have departed, Yonah Schimmel’s is one of the few distinctly Jewish businesses and restaurants that remain as a fixture of this largely departed culture and cuisine. [Yonah Shimmel]
My knowledge of knishes is limited as the one I had at Ben’s in Bayside a few years ago didn’t set my world on fire, and today I didn’t want to spoil dinner, but I imagine I’ll get in either Shimmel or Knish Nosh in Rego Park eventually to find what knishes are about.
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1/19/25