Many of the responders to this blog tell me their parents owned the neighborhood cleaners, pharmacy, grocery or candy store. What a quaint concept. No one-hour commute. How totally last century! And the stores were open six days a week. All their lives my grandparents struggled so they wouldn't have to live above the store. I think of that every day on my one-hour commute to work.
The impatient among you readers are still trying to figure out what the title of this blog has to do with these neighborhood stores. Some of you may know; don't give away our little secret.
The impatient among you readers are still trying to figure out what the title of this blog has to do with these neighborhood stores. Some of you may know; don't give away our little secret.
Most of the stores in our neighborhood were truly neighborhood stores. The 'owner' of the store may not have been the landlord, but for all intense and purposes, he, or she, was the owner.
But scattered throughout the business district were what we called 'chain stores.' Most notable, Woolworths. What, you think old FW lived above the store on Utica Avenue?
Another was Ebinger's. If you lived in Brooklyn you know what Ebinger's is, or was.
Ebingers was started by a German immigrant family in 1898. There was a bunch of them in Brooklyn and by the time the chain went belly-up in 1972 there were 67 in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Nassau and Suffolk. The bakery and distribution center was on Bedford near Snyder and if the wind was blowing in a westerly direction, the aroma would not just float over Erasmus; it would sort of caress the school. The goods were delivered to the stores several times a day in red and black electric-powered trucks that would invariably double park blocking the trolleys on Church Avenue.
I still drool just thinking about Ebingers layer cake, but hands down, the blackout cake was to die for. Ebinger's also did some miracle work with crumb cakes and buns. Those in the know would just pick off the crumb topping leaving the rest of the family to deal with a virtually bald bun.
There was a certain irony in that the majority of Ebingers' Brooklyn customers were Jewish which did not extend to their hiring practices. Anyway, Ebingers died a quiet death, allegedly because it did not follow its customers out of the City in the late sixties and seventies.
If you didn't go to Ebingers, there was Sutters on Flatbush and Caton or you went to a 'Jewish' bakery. You didn't have to be Jewish to own a Jewish bakery. If it was a bakery and you lived in Flatbush, it was a Jewish bakery - pronounced as one word. That's it; don't argue; don't ask why. Just get a small seeded rye and ask them to slice it. And make sure it's fresh.
Truth in advertising did not apply to local bakeries or fruit stores. "Of course it's fresh! Would I sell your mudda sompem that ain't fresh?
Aside from all those mixing machines in the back, bakeries had two of the most fascinating pieces of machinery. Sure, the butcher had his saw that could cut through bone like it was butter, (a bad analogy, especially in a kosher butcher shop) and the shoe maker had that neat row of grinders and belts and brushes, but bakeries had bread-slicing machines and cord tying machines. You know, those gismos that would wrap a cord around a box in five seconds including tying the knot. How it do that? Bakeries provided a never-ending supply of cord that wound up in your kitchen junk drawer with the 175 packets of sauce from the Chinese take-out place. But, even cord had its hierarchy. The Ebingers' brown and green cord was the most coveted and would be used only for special occasions. Come on. You gonna tell me your mother didn't save cord?
And while we're on bakery-related rhetorical questions: What ever happened to all those display cabinets for charlotte rouses sitting outside bakeries and candy stores? And why were charlotte rouses sold only in warm weather?
Here's an interesting tidbit: Charlotte Rouse was a real person - a turn of the century spinster school teacher, who, coupled with what must have been her dislike of children and a weird sense of humor, designed a dessert that would frustrate generations of children. Try to push up the cake through the cardboard cylinder without it popping straight up through the top, grazing your nose and just as quickly plummeting onto the floor.
Here's one more: Did you know that bagel and bialy bakers belonged to different unions? Both items could not be made in the same bakery if it was a union shop. When you bought bagels in a bakery that sold cakes and breads, the bagels were made elsewhere. (Sorry, buddy, to burst your bagel-bialy bubble.)
Each neighborhood store had its loyal following. (Notice, we're getting back to our original topic?) Would you ever think of going into a candy store that was not your 'regular' store? Eaast Flatbush must have been the candy addict capital because our local candy store, which was officially Hoffman's Soda Shoppe and Luncheonette- had competition on all sides - four within two blocks; including one down the block from Dave Hoffman's shoppe. How did any of them make a living? Probably by staying open from six in the morning until nine at night, six days a week. My taste buds were trained not to want anything sweet on Tuesdays, when Dave's was closed.
At home we had freezers large enough to hold two ice cube trays. If we wanted ice cream, we'd go down to Dave's and order a pint of hand-packed ice cream and we'd stand over him to make sure he packed that container inside a metal 'sleeve' so it wouldn't split
We grew up in the age of specialization without knowing what it was. In what was close to a mile stretch along Church Avenue I knew of only three supermarkets. There was a Shop Rite near Ralph Avenue, a Henny Penny near Schenectady Av and a newer Bohack near Albany Av. Other than that, if you wanted vegetables, you went to a vegetable store; milk was sold in a grocery store, bread in a bakery, fish in a fish store and appetizing (whatever that means) in an appetizing store.
How's this for specialization? we bought salmon in a fish store; smoked salmon from the appetizing store.
That's where we went for halavah which was sold in bulk. Sol would carve a slab from a giant block. While we're in drool mode, think chocolate covered jelly candies and all those other goodies - all unpackaged, just sitting there, strategically placed at waist height for a six-year old? If your father didn't own a candy store, the next best thing was grazing rights in an appetizing store.
There was a ritual to buying lox (smoked salmon to those of you who might have just arrived from Iowa). The slicing of lox added new meaning to the word 'thin.' Thin was too thick. If you couldn't see through it, it was too thick. And an eighth of a pound could easily serve a family of six. A pound of lox? You bought a pound maybe for a bar mitzvah. Our local appetizing store must have hired moonlighting surgeons to slice lox. (Yeah, I know: sturgeon surgeons.)
There was even an art to applying the lox to a bagel. (In my house if you wanted lox it had to be with cream cheese and it had to be on a bagel. Case closed. I remember the first time I had cream cheese and lox on something that was not a bagel. It just didn't taste right.)
I grew up in a 'dot' house. This meant you took a small slice of lox and to make it last you cut it up into even smaller pieces and placed it strategically over the cream cheese so that each bite would have some lox. This process paved the way for the splitting of the atom, which was a piece of cake in comparison. Rich people put an entire slice of lox on their bagel. I used to dream of someday being rich enough to do that. Gentiles sometimes did that when they wanted to 'assimilate,' or wanted a change from the usual corned beef with mayo on white bread diet.
Each store had its unique aroma, but none compared to the smell of the fish store. My mother went to Al's on Church near Schenectady. No one could accuse these local merchants of creativity in naming their establishments. The decision centered solely around whether to use the owner's first or last name. Al's offered the freshest fish at the best prices. It was the best. It was the best because my mother knew. Yeah, I know. Your mother also went to the best fish store, wherever it was. Everyone's mother did. Same for the bakery.
Maybe not so for the grocery. There, your allegiance was based on proximity. And on your family's ability to join the hallowed ranks of those to whom credit was extended. I'm sure there were others, but I knew of only two stores in Brooklyn that extended credit to its customers: Abraham & Straus downtown Brooklyn (no plastic credit card; an imbossed oval metal tag on a key chain) and Lou's Fine Groceries on Church Avenue. I would be sent down to Lou's for a container of milk (or 'a milk') and a stick of butter and maybe a measure of sour cream. Never eggs. It wasn't until I started driving that I was trusted to carry a dozen eggs a block and a half. And after I told Lou or his wife what I wanted, he took the big pencil from behind his ear, licked the point, and would add up the order on the paper bag. Maybe he didn't got such good English, but he sure as hell knew addition - unless it was more than five items. More than five items, out came the adding machine. And I would tell him to 'put it on the wall' and he would write the amount under our name with his big pencil on a sheet of wrapping paper on the wall.
Every Saturday my mother would go in and Lou would add up all the orders we had bought for the week and she would pay. Never a dispute; no call to Customer Service to talk to a representative who would thank my mother for holding and reminding her how important this call was.
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| Lou always wore an apron. It added a sense of importance and helped identify him as the proprietor. (Who else would be standing behind the counter?) This picture was taken within the first two days of the month - hence the apron's almost sterile condition. |
OK. For you non-Brooklynites: a container is what you outlanders erroneously refer to as a carton, or quart of milk; a stick of butter would be a quarter-pound package of butter (one-pound boxes would be opened and the individual 'sticks' would be sold separately) and measures of sour cream (a 'measure' according to my grandmother) defy derivation. The best I can conjure up is that at one time sour cream was sold in bulk to the merchant who then ladled out a supply to the customer. Hey, if you can do better, let me know!
Before we leave Lou, what's the deal with licking the point of the pencil before writing? There had to be a more effective method of contracting lead poisoning.
That was my exposure to the world of commerce - the mom-and-pop shops on the avenues. Shops where we were actually known; shops that, if we wanted, actually delivered.
Next session we'll touch on the sub category of merchants - the street guys.
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