That Gallus Old Codger....

Some of you are familiar with my second book Call Me Daddy - Babes and Bathos in Edward West Browning's Jazz-Age New York.  As with all my work, new surprises keep coming:

Here he is, "that gallus old codger," as Damon Runyon would write some ten months later: 52-year old Daddy Browning at the time of his engagement to 15-year old Frances "Peaches" Heenan.  Look at the evil mug on the chap !  And what are those bandages and scars on Peaches' face, neck and arms?

It's March or April, 1926 (the couple was married on April 10th) and mobs of reporters had been following them around for many weeks already as Daddy took his not-so-little girl shopping on Fifth Avenue in his rented, chauffered peacock-blue Rolls Royce.  Something went very WRONG, though (perhaps a Lothario appeared at her door, at least closer to Peaches in age than the old satyr?).  One night an intruder entered Peaches' boudoir through an un-locked fire-escapte window and splashed acid on the girl's face.  A very neat job it was: no stains on the bedclothes, no signs of a struggle or forced entry.

Daddy Browning rushed uptown when he heard the news and convinced Peaches' mother to keep the police out of it withhis promises to secure all requisite medical care.  What were his motives and who really dunnit?  Res ipsa loquitur, so I say....

[photo courtesy of The Green-Wood Historic Fund - all rights reserved]

A DEED, NOW DONE....

My Skype screen glowed and there he was, his 66-year old voice as clear as a bell, a bald head with a kind face beaming at me.  Bob Newmark looks a bit like a kind-faced Kojak, or perhaps Yul Brynner in his prime.  Once again my friend Roger Joslyn, genealogist extroardinaire, plucked an arrow from his magic quiver, struck a bulls-eye for me far across the Atlantic, and a sea of time.


Szaja Rotblatt is six feet under at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, laid next to his wife, Helen three years after her death in 1946.  I hesitate to use the common saying. "Laid to rest" he certainly wasn't, as he'd left Helen for another woman and run off to Florida, leaving her bitter, to raise her daughter Eleanor, alone in the Bronx.  The memorial plaque in my most recent blog post Dumped... to the memory of Szaja Rotblatt, honored officer of the United Hatters Sick and Benevolent Society, found in a street-side pile of demolition debris in midtown many years ago by Andrew Weinstock, finally can be returned, Szaja's memory honored at least by one.


Eleanor was Bob Newmark's mother.  She never spoke of her parents; Szaja died when Bob was only four, and Helen three years earlier.  Bob's parents shlepped him twice a year to Mt. Hebron cemetery where they had one of the old men, who apparently earned his keep this way, accompany Bob to the gravesite and say mourner's kaddish for Bob's grandparents. Szaja, known as David to the family, had come from Warsaw, via Paris, before the First World War, with his wife and his children, a blocker in the hat trade.  The family was poor; Bob's two uncles never attended college, nor did his mother, Eleanor, who aspired to become a lawyer, but had to settle for secretarial school.

The story spilled from Bob's lips.  He'd known nothing of his maternal grandparents.  I'd suspected such misery: a large bronze memorial plaque in a pile of trash?  There must have been pain.  All of the sudden, the image on the Skype sceen changed: Bob went into a back room in his Amsterdam apartment, and re-emerged with a sepia-toned photo, tears pouring from his eyes.  There they stand, Szaja, in a straw boater and well-tailored suit, oysgeputst, as they say in Yiddish, all dressed up.  Next to him is Helen in a fabulous lady's dress, her hat a gaint milliner's confection with broad brim and all manner of accoutrements. In front of them in an orderly row stand three of their children, the middle little Eleanor in a lovely smock, two brothers on eaither side.  Tears of joy rolled on.


Bob's a native New Yorker, Sheepshead Bay born and bred, a Brooklyn College graduate.  After a few years on the West Coast, he moved, 42 years ago, to the Netherlands, where he has worked for decades as a professional Dutch-English translator.  A brilliant, gentle, simpatico, sensitive man.  His father, Max Newmark, married Eleanor in 1931, and worked in the fur trade until it, too, fell apart.  I'd tracked this couple to Florida many months ago, though a distant Rotblatt relation, but it took my buddy Roger Joslyn to find Bob Newmark.  Imagine my thrill.


What does it take to close a circle?  I'll hand-carry the plaque to Bob in the coming spring.  Peysakh, Passover, is a time of renewal, the Jewish predecessor of Easter, a myth reborn.  What sort of sacrifice should I make in thanksgiving?  The dead now are raised, a circle closed and  a bond opened.  Bob will tell me more and you'll read as the story is more told.

Dumped...

Driving east on a mid-town street in the mid-1980s, my acquaintance Andy W. spotted a bronze plaque in a pile of demolition debris.  Intrigued by the shiny item, he stopped and rescued this memorial plaque, dumped on the street at the start of renovation of a former union headquarters of the millinery trade. How in heaven’s name could the crew have been so heartless? The memory of a tzadik, a righteous man named Szaja Rotblatt, was thrown without ceremony into the trash.

























In this simple metallic scroll lies a story of proportions yet unmeasured. Perhaps they never truly will be. Through my search, its outline emerges. One day soon, this plaque will be mounted again in a place of honor. ‘Til then, the internet marks the spot for it to be.

Szaja David Rotblatt was not famous or well-known, except to his comrades in the hatters’ trade. As I learned from his US citizenship naturalization papers, filed in New York County Supreme Court in 1914, Szaja was born in 1873 in Warsaw, and found work there as a blocker, the craftsman who places a cut and partially-formed hat on a mold and shapes it into a finished item.

It’s hard to conceive how important hats once were. JFK ended that for men mid-century, with an uncovered head at his snowy January inauguration, 1961. Jackie actually extended the life of ladies’ headwear, her signature pillbox numbers, re-defining classic style for the shrinking number of women who went about hat-adorned. Four decades before, Mary Pickford’s classic short “The Hat,” epitomized the role that Szaja’s craft played in American society. Take a gander at this tasty depiction.
A woman’s hat was worth sacrifices so she could be beautiful and feel wanted; take another gander at this 1912 Mary Pickford silent short, The New York Hat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk8Pd3VbYiI


Life in Poland was no picnic for a Jew, and poor economic conditions as well as rampant anti-Semitism sent Szaja, his wife Helen, and their three children to Paris where they booked passage in 1908 aboard the steamship La Provence that sailed from Le Havre on December 12, 1908. "Russia" is listed as the family's native country as was the custom in the day (Poland being then still dominated by the Czar). Isaac, age 8, Herman, age 4, and Eleanora, age 2, (whose name was shortened to Eleanor in the USA), accompanied their mother, whose Yiddish name was Chaye, and their father, listed as David (Schaye) Rothblatt. Left behind in Paris was the family's friend, Mendel Relmann, of 14 Rue Eugene Sue in the center of Montmartre in the 18th Arrondissement, hard by the Metro Marcadet Poisonniers, downhill and north of Sacre Coeur. Relmann's 26-year old son Isidore, a tailor, was also aboard. Apparently the Rotblatt family had resided in France for some time before their departure for the Golden Land, at least long enough to form a friendship with the Relmann family.

By 1910, the Rotblatt family had landed in East Harlem, a mecca for Eastern European Jews. Slightly less crowded than the Lower East Side, and with a housing stock, albeit also dilapidated, in general many decades younger than that downtown, the Rotblatts rented in the neighborhood at 117 East 115th Street, where they are listed on the 1910 census. The family spoke Yiddish at home as did most of their Jewish neighbors. Szaja found work in the millinery shops downtown, where the shop-floor language as well as the fiery rhetoric at union meetings was the same.

By 1917, the United Cap and Hatmakers Union of North America was in the forefront of radical socialist labor struggles in the US. Its monthly organ, The Headgear Worker, was published in Yiddish and English.

The December 1917 issue wishes its readers a happy New Year, and then launches into a frequently heard rallying cry for the increasingly leftist group which had just seen a year filled with the Bolshevik uprising in Russia and major outbreaks of anti-capitalist furor all over the Western world.

In boldface caps, Szaja and his comrades were exhorted:

THE PASSED YEAR WAS RICH IN EVENTS MAKING IT AN EPOCH IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. STRUGGLING IN SEAS OF BLOOD AND UNDER THE THUNDER OF CANNONS, THE HUMAN FAMILY IS PROGRESSING TO ITS FULL EMANCIPATION FROM ALL FORMS OF POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SLAVERY. TOGETHER WITH THE THRONE OF THE CZAR WAS [sic] ALSO SHATTERED THE THRONES OF THE CAPITALIST AUTOCRATS, AND EVEN IN GERMANY THERE ARE SIGNS OF THE AWAKENING OF THE PEOPLE AND ITS READINESS TO CAST OFF THE YOKE OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS AND ALL THEIR CAPITALIST COTERIE. LET THE COMING NEW YEAR ACCOMPLISH YOUR AND OUR FULL HEARTS DESIRE...

Thus ended a year that had devastated Szaja's homeland and the rest of Europe. The end of the next would throw both Europe and the United States into a financial tail-spin, as the bubble of war work and munitions production ended with Armistice Day 1918. Military contracts for headgear disappeared from the New York shops and with that came reduced wages and hours for hatters across the board. During the mid-decade, struggles over affiliation with the more conservative United Hatters of North America had grown. The December 1916 issue of the The Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers Journal included articles such as "Does it Pay to be a Union Member," and two by the prominent hatter's union activist Max Zaritsky about the internal workings of the union and its participation in the "Joint Council," even though the United Hatters were a conservative group who refused to be classed as a needle trade (unlike their comrades in the cloth hat trade). The United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers of North America was a radical bund, its monthly journal packed with articles spewing Socialist flames, railing against the bosses and capitalist greed. The two groups included as their members almost 100% of the hatters, who comprised 32,000 members by 1921, mostly in New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

Some men are born to lead, and others not; Some choose a small pond in which to be big fish. In America, everyone could count. In the sweatshop, Szaja was likely a nobody, poorly paid and exploited to the bone. Out the door, though, he could be someone. The Union Hatters Sick and Benevolent Society was his standing stone. "Founder and Leader" reads the bronze tablet. “Recording Secretary:” his name is proclaimed, incised on the grey granite gates of its burial field. These gates and graves and the discarded tablet are the only palpable remainders of the UHSBS, its records lost to the wind after its liquidation in 1990. Neither the YIVO archives at the Center for Jewish History, nor the UHSBS custodian, Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, nor the New York State Insurance Department Liquidation Bureau know the whereabouts of the files that would shed light on Szaja's deeds, those that caused the tablet's fashioners to sing his praises for his efforts during the group's "darkest hours." The stench of red-baiting filled my nostrils as I read the raised letters on my newest find. I imagined more was at hand than a testimonial to a burial society well-run.

The spaghetti twists of interchanges near the north side of Flushing Meadow Park bollix the mind, winding in and out of the park's borders and carefully avoiding the consecrated ground of Mt. Hebron cemetery, named after the hill from which the patriarch Moses was condemned to watch as his people entered the land of milk and honey without him. What a strange name for the site of over 1,000,000 Jewish burials! There I’d found Szaja listed in the cemetery’s website.


Thousands of gravestones stood like pine trees in a forest as I drove the paths, searching for his grave. Was Szaja really there? Did it matter to anyone? Perhaps I and my acquaintance Andy are in a club of our own. We want to know everything about this man, and resurrect him memory best as we can. Though Szaja’s wife of many years is buried next to him, I know through census records that they lived apart in the Bronx in 1930, and that at her death in June 1946 in Monticello, NY, the informant was a man named Charles Roth of Mosholu Parkway, not Szaja, her husband, who perhaps was spending June back in New York.


Szaja and Helen Rotblatt indeed lie side by side in the UHSBS plot near Mt. Hebron’s eastern gates.
Though well-tended, the plot is the worse for wear; no burials have been done there since 2008 and little, if any, room remains. The list of officers inscribed on the gates is a long one. America meant equality and opportunity for all. You didn't need yikhes or a fancy degree to serve as an officer of burial society. Nonetheless, doing so furnished a modicum of self-respect. Szaja was revered, though his wife may not have loved him. His memory isn’t dumped yet. I intend it never be.

Batya in the Heart of Darkness

The title of Joseph Conrad's novel has always intrigued me, though I’ve never cracked a page. I understand the scenes to be strange and frightful; you never know what's coming next. New York City is a jungle, too, of cultures and races, living at each other’s edges, and so it is at Bedford and Nostrand, down at the southern end of Flatbush, where the 2 and 5 trains end their runs, disgorging their loads of hoi polloi. Just to the east lies Brooklyn College, a melange if ever there was one, every people that Brooklyn holds. The stew pot simmers: in three directions the lilt of Island accents fills the air, some gentle, others rough. Jamaicans predominate for vast dozens of blocks north, as well as east and west, even a bit south, having replaced the white folks, many Jewish, who fled in the early 60s during the epidemic of racist block busting that spread like cholera, just as immigration policies loosened in the States. South on Bedford, perhaps ten blocks, the next generation of bourgeois Jewish culture flourishes, its population of all-rightniks morphed into one of the many Orthodox communities that cover Midwood and many other non-Hasidic Brooklyn enclaves.

Over the years, drugs have overwhelmed countless Flatbush blocks, Rasta devils careening though the streets in SUVs with tints, making U turns and doing doughnuts in the middle of Flatbush Avenue as pedestrians scatter. Where Yiddish was once heard day-in day-out, from the subway junction all the way north to Martense Street and beyond, pistol shots now ring out in the middle of the day when deals go bad. Even the $1.00 van drivers who swoop up and down Flatbush, stealing fares from the MTA, know to beware. Their CB radio aerials suddenly stand still as the gang vans screech by. Stand and watch anywhere at the junction: white kids from Brooklyn college who traipse to the subway from the west on their way home stand out like so many sore thumbs.

Several weeks ago on my way to the beach, I emerged from the subway in the middle of the bubbling stew, my bike in hand to complete my journey to Rockapulco after the train ride out. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I spotted a mermaid, her bright form beckoning to me, calling my name. In the sea of Black faces, the figure of a short, elderly white woman with a shopping cart caught my attention. She was troubling herself, assessing how to the safely cross the street. It was hot and humid and she was obviously disoriented. I came up to her and asked her if I could help.

Batya, indeed, might as well have sported a fish-tail, her presence in the intersection so strange that hot summer day. Dressed in matching bright red-accented clothing, her color scheme matched her little metal cart, packed to the gills with her earthly possessions. She was looking for an address on Bedford Avenue. After we safely crossed the Red Sea and she could talk safely, it turned out that Batya, though clean and presentable, was homeless. She’d walked all the way from Crown Heights, a sizable hike, seeking shelter at a government office that might provide subsidized apartment to replace the one from which she claimed she'd been driven by her neighbors, due to her past career as a “private eye.” Hmm, I thought, perhaps even one percent of this is true....

All this came out as we tottered down Bedford, after I managed to help her cross the street, gripping my bike frame in one hand and taking her arm with the other. Mermaids are notorious for their powers of persuasion. But it wasn’t Batya’s ample breasts that summoned me thither. A more powerful tool was at her command: I detected an accent once commonly heard on the corner where we met. Yiddish is gone from Bedford and Nostrand, dead as the white buffalo, its melodies extinct. I had to pinch myself to make sure it was real. Batya's Yiddish was more than serviceable. I was tempted to call the Natural History Museum with my sighting. Rara avis flew in my face.

Her story poured out as we moved down the sidewalk. Once a cherished Roumanian Jewish daughter, her parents had fled east with her during the Holocaust, ending up in a transit camp in Siberia. Along the way, shrapnel from a Wehrmacht shell injured her right hand. The scars were proudly displayed as she told me her childhood name in Italian: Beatrice, how her parents loved her so. Then the War came. All that tender youth is long gone, murdered by Hitler, then Stalin, then life. Who knows how she came to the shores of America? Close relatives live here, but her homelessness is not a bit their concern.

What does one do when confronted with misery, a human soul wandering in the dark, obviously nuts? How to put one’s arms around the situation (or them), what to do, what is ethical, beyond the knee-jerk reaction to not get involved. I was genuinely concerned, despite her obvious mental illness, that Batya come to no harm in the middle of the day. She formed an obvious target for those up to no good. I turned instead to selfish concerns, though, wanting a photo to save of this moment, that of juxtaposition and language, so strange. “No,” came her answer when I asked her permission. $1000 was her price to capture her face. Crazy she might be, but Batya had seykhl, the street smarts to handl with what was in play. I came up to $20 but that was my limit. We parted, my mermaid and I come to nothing. The odor of fishy intentions lingered about. Still it was special: Yiddish at the Junction. I’ll turn to learning Jamaican patios now, and get up to date.

More on Peaches and Daddy

Peaches Browning may have failed in her bid for wealth when her suit for divorce, a property settlement, and alimony against Daddy Browning failed in March, 1926, but all was not lost. Her fame was nationwide now, and her teenage dreams of a stage career on solid ground. Caroline Heenan, Peaches’ mother, who had encouraged her daughter’s relationship with the old goat so as to prevent Peaches from pursuing a questionable stage career, changed her tune fast now that marriage to the elderly Browning had failed to deliver its original, ostensible rewards for the Heenans. An about-face was warranted for the budding performer, now that something of value could apparently be salvaged from Peaches’ acquaintance with Daddy B.
Here’s a pub shot of peroxided Peaches, circa 1927 just when her vaudeville act took off.

Clad in dark velvet, expertly draped to conceal the zaftig nature of her major gams, the now 17-year old Peaches struck a demure a pose on a sawhorse that was surely cropped out of the shot before distribution.

While waiting for the trial court’s decision in her marital battle, Peaches and her Momma took a breather from the intense spotlight in which they had bathed since her April, 1926 nuptials. A cruise to Bermuda was just the thing. Here they are in early February, 1927 on the deck of S.S. Fort Victoria. She must have gotten something from the old geezer even though her divorce claim was foundering: perhaps the sale of some of the contents of the 20 or so trunks of finery carted away by her as she and her mom removed from the Kew Gardens Hotel in October, 1926 paid for the undoubtedly expensive passage. Six months of co-habitation with Daddy B. and his puerile antics had been more than enough. Temporary support was substantially denied to Peaches when Browning anticipated his teenage wife’s legal strategy and sued for a separation soon after she walked out.

During the pendency of the outlandish legal battle, fought in Carmel and White Plains, New York, wags paved the way for Peaches ’incipient stage career as a flaming chanteuse. Here’s Lon Mooney’s Tin Pan Alley hit, I’m All Alone in a Palace of Stone, with a morose Daddy staring at the tabloic headlines announcing his beloved’s flight. A winsome Peaches, clad in an unusually matronly frock, looks off into the distance, her grown-up visage belying her sum total of 16 years.

Peaches made quite a stir once she started appearing on the regional vaudeville stage. Despite a field crowded with Ziegfeld girls and Busby Berkeley wannabes, Cinderella Wannabe mattered enough for celebrity photographer Cheney Johnston to capture her inflammable essence in this smoking hot studio shot, her sizeable pins again gamely disguised, as she looks off-stage.
Peaches had earned her fame the hard way, battling competition at every turn. Browning was no easy catch during their short courtship, having solicited over 12,000 girls in his infamous 1925 newspaper ad that ended with a Czech girl, Mary Louise Spas, supposedly 16, being legally adopted until her true age was smoked out. Here he is in the same season of his and Peaches’ initial acquaintance, clad in what was reported as a gold vest.
The satyr is seated next to Miss Ethelinda Cooley, beaming at having brought down the house with his skill as her Charleston partner before a crowd of 1000 at the Commodore Hotel in late February 1926. Check out Mama Cooley’s stern smile behind her daughter’s smiling bee-stung lipped puss, an iron matron’s firm grasp on the white-haired so-called gentleman’s shoulder. Where is sweet Ethelinda’s mother’s other hand? Ready, aim, FIRE, just in case. Even old Daddy wouldn’t have dared fondle Ethelinda’s tight thigh. At least ‘til a bit later….

15 months later, a lot of water, under the bridge. Here is poor old Daddy again, May, 1928, kneeling on the ceiling of a glass vault in his real estate office, where 2,200,000 letters to him from young women all over the world were hoarded and savored by the old Terah. His appetite was never sated, even after Mary Louise Spas and Peaches were long gone.



Imagine my surprise when the phone rang this past March, and an old man calling from Florida inquired. “Is this Benjamin Feldman? I’m Warren Lee, and you’re gonna WANT to talk to me. I read your book. I’m in the know.” Warren’s father, Henry Lee f/k/a Hyman Levy, knew Daddy Browning more than well. Back in 1919, Hy was discharged from the Army. An orthodox Jewish boy from Brooklyn was ready to go to work, and his training in the service as a stenographer and typist would come in to play. Edward West Browning ran a large realty empire by that time, but his proclivity for members of the distaff side made it inadvisable for him to have women in his office as employees. Male secretaries were on the outs already in much of this country, but Browning preferred them, and when Hy Levy answered the newspaper ad placed by WASP-extraordinaire Browning, he was hired for the job. Browning may have been anti-Semitic, but he recognized select male members of the tribe as extraordinarily capable. Perhaps Browning’s career as a black sheep in the staid and pedigreed Browning family made him sympathetic to the Jews as social outcasts.
Daddy Browning knew smarts and ambition when he saw them, and how to employ them in others for his own uses and aid. By 1926, when Warren was born, Browning had made Hy Levy wealthy, giving him pieces of deals and a healthy salary, advancing him from clerk to appraiser as Edbro Realty Corp. grew. Chartered day-boats up the Hudson River for company parties, lavish presents for children of favored employees, access arranged for Hy Levy to “restricted” uptown clubs were all Browning’s pleasure, his largesse as an employer matching the mis-directed efforts he made with young women. The secret of what possessed his twisted soul would follow Daddy to the other world, as children who benefitted from one of the Browning charities sprinkled white orchids into his grave.

With the onset of the Great Depression, Edbro Realty suffered, and Hy Levy left to strike out on his own. Leaving his race-horses at the Belmont track his New York Jockey club membership behind and his wife and two children at their home on 169th Street in Jamaica, Queens, Levy hied himself down to Dallas, Texas, where he was hired as a car salesman by the C.S. Hamilton Chrysler dealership. There was one hitch before starting day, though. Hyman Levy was required to deracinate his last name turning non-Hebrew: H.L. Lee. Gertrude Levy and her sons must joined Hy there, and Warren graduated from a Dallas High School. Lee’s sales acumen was probably considerable: Chrysler took Hy Lee away, making Warren’s father manager of its West Texas Mopar parts division. After being moved for that post to tiny Kermit, Texas, Hy Lee was rejoined by his wife, Gertrude in 1934. Warren and his older brother Robert, both over 18 by then, elected to return to New York, their last names also by then changed to Lee.

Warren was born on February 2, 1926 at Eastern Parkway Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn, so it’s likely that the family lived not far away then. The Levys were itinerant, just like Daddy Browning, who rented his many homes despite massive real estate holdings of his own. One of Hy Levy’s perks during his tenure with Edbro was to occupy apartments for short periods in his boss’ holdings. He also took advantage of the liberal free rent periods that were customary in apartment rentals in those days. While Warren was a small child, the Levy family even lived around the corner from Caroline and Peaches, at 654 West 170th Street, and Warren told me that his older brother Robert remembered visiting the Heenan apartment back in the days of Daddy’s courting there. Warren also remembers living in the same Washington Heights neighborhood when he was a grammar school student at P.S. 173, a fortress that still stands on Fort Washington Avenue and West 173rd Street. Warren’s his apartment house neighbor, Neil “Doc” Simon, was teased mercilessly by his older classmates when he brought a new toy doctor kit downstairs to play.

Before or after the Levys’ residence at Browning’s typical needle-like apartment house that Edbro built at 42 West 72nd Street, Warren also remembers living at The Majestic, on the southwest corner of Central Park West and 72nd Street. Hy Levy must have been doing quite well! Today, apartments at the Majestic cost $2000 per square foot and UP; even in the Depression they weren’t too cheap. Little Warren, 7 or 8 years old, remembers well the gift one Christmas from Browning of a miniature coal-fired locomotive and tender hitched behind, which his mother would take him in to Central Park, across the street from the Majestic. Warren had to be the envy of even the richest kid on the street, trundling about in this contraption after he visited Browning in his West 61st Street office to thank him personally, with his Mom.

Stories fade and collective memory fails us; even a fellow as well-known as Daddy Browning, the laughing stock of America in the Roaring Twenties, is now barely a cipher on the screen. I feel special having heard from Warren Lee. He’s quite possibly the only human being on the face of the earth who shook the hand that petted Peaches’ sweet hide.

**************************************************
All images, except the Cheney Johnston portrrait of Peaches) are the property of and presented through the courtesy of The Green-Wood Historic Fund

A Sow's Ear...

[Author's note: for more about the author and the creation of this piece, see The New York Times article about him July 2nd, 2011 at http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/chasing-a-name-lost-to-time-2/ ]

"You can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse" goes the popular refrain. I beg to differ, though. Sometimes one may.

Browsing among the vast piles of bric-a-brac in a Chelsea flea market right before Hannukah, a tiny leather change purse caught my eye. Sifting through piles of dust-covered junk, golden lettering on the item's battered side gleamed at me like a nugget in dirt.. The Yiddish version of the old saw sprang into my head, my grandfather's shmaltz-coated voice ringing in my ears: Fun a khazerishe ek, makht men nisht keyn shtraymel" "From the tail-end of a pig, one doesn't make a Hasidic man's fur-banded holiday headpiece."

Suddenly I was sure I had beaten the odds. Though designed for small coins and subway tokens, and ostensibly empty, I knew right away that this little sack held lode-bearing ore. Sol. Goldberg's Cafe and Restaurant 71 Canal Street 2111 ORCHARD glowed from the crinkled skin. This lagniappe, this swag, held a big, fat story. Who was my fellow, this Jewish version of Oscar Delmonico, dreaming success for his little hash house? Likely, his reach exceeded his grasp.

Desperate to know, I rushed downtown to Allen and Canal Streets and found Sol's building still standing there, now home to Chinese restaurant suppliers and factory lofts with no names on their doors. The scent of secret commerce and bribery filled the air.

71 Canal Street today



Nearby loomed a ghost-ridden tower. The florid 1912 shell of Jarmulowsky's Bank still dominates the corner of Eldridge and Canal. That family fortune started in Hamburg, where in the 1870s patriarch Sender J. sold steerage tickets to multitudes of Sol Goldbergs on credit, and then "safeguarded" their tiny savings from miserable New York sweatshop salaries squirrelled away after paying off their passage debts. Thousands of depositors lost everything at the outbreak of The Great War when the bank suddenly failed.

Jarmlovsky's Bank - Corner of Eldridge and Canal Streets



The deceased founder's two sons had been "jumpers" in Harlem real estate schemes, using hard-earned passbook dollars to speculate, instead of protecting their depositors' gelt. A near-riot ensued as a mob marched on City Hall, demanding justice and restitution. As I gazed on the majestic facade of the failed institution, all about me drifted vapors of cheap booze on the breaths of disconsolate barflies, drowning the misery at Sol's bar and brass rail. Then I hurried home with my precious purchase.

Consider the phone number in the purse's gilt lettering. Why its strange order? I knew the purse was old, but exactly from when? New York telephone exchanges disappeared in the 1960s with the introduction of "all-number" dialing. Memorialized by novels like BUtterfield 8, two letters and a digit corresponding to the third letter of the old exchange names began all connections after 1920. But on this leather trinket, as was the custom before 1921, four digits precede the exchange. A determined push through the fog of Manhattan telephone and borough address directories cleared the glass. Sol Goldberg was a liquor dealer and saloon operator down on Canal Street, handing out change purses while striving to stay alive after Prohibition's 1919 start.

A visit to the New York County Clerk's Office followed my phonebook leaf-through. I found another listing in a reverse directory for 1920 at 71 Canal next to Sol Goldberg and his cafe. The "Eagle Non-Intoxicating Wine Company" fit right in. A quick visit to the New York County Clerk's Office confirmed the formation of this majestic-sounding enterprise by Sol and his elder son Herbert. Hope and khutspeh survived, even after Carrie Nation won the brawl. But business was lousy or perhaps it needed a quieter address. By 1921, Sol and Herb disappeared from Canal Street without a trace. The long arm of the law visited in October, 1920: Indicted on three counts of violating the Volstead Act, including that Sol "unlawfully, wittingly and knowingly, did sell 1 glass of whiskey to Isidor Einstein" at 71 Canal Street on October 17th, Sol pleaded guilty on February 8, 1921 in Federal Court in Foley Square and paid a fine of $250. Things were all downhill from there.



Solomon Goldberg emigrated from Kėdainiai, Lithuania (listed as Russia in the census records) in 1892 in his late teens, and then left New York to stay with relatives in Virginia where he found work in a sheriff's office. By 1898 he had returned to New York, and lived at 149 Ludlow Street, shown here as it is today. Here also is Sol's photo, taken in Charleston, SC.





Engaged to Rosa Fridlander, Sol married his lantsman in 1898 in a non-religious ceremony performed by alderman James Gaffney at 232 East 22nd Street in front of two gentile witnesses. Her father's photo, probably taken in Norfolk, VA, where the Fridlanders had immigrated, is below.

Sol leased one of his first saloons at 17 Ludlow by 1902, a modest structure on the west side of Ludlow, just north of Canal. Though the ethnicity of the building and surrounding blocks is overwhelmingly Chinese today, 17 Ludlow, its back house, and the immediate environs bear a remarkable resemblance to how they looked in 1902. Overcrowded apartments and small businesses dominate the neighboring tenements. Steam vents still pour from upper floor windows. Chinese signs are plastered on doorways. Mandarin or Yiddish, it's all the same: struggling to survive remains the game.

17 LUDLOW AND ITS BACK-HOUSE, TODAY

With the backing of the omnipresent Lion Brewing Company, Sol signed a formal lease for 17 Ludlow's northerly store and the four dwelling rooms above, for a term of five years, starting March 5, 1903. The rent was pegged at $75 a month, with Sol giving a promissory note of $103 for security, while also agreeing to pay charges for "Croton Water."

THE LION BREWING COMPANY-MANHATTAN VALLEY NYC




The big news that day in Der Forverts ? A scandal broke about mid-wives in the neighborhood who had banded together in a baby-selling syndicate. Women involved in secret affairs were said to purchase infants on the open market and then extort money from their lovers. The midwives belonged to a co-operative exchange, helping each other out in cases of short inventory and operating a clearing house likened by the reporter to that which banks use for processing checks !



Front and center, page 1? A story entitled “A Head Is Also a Piece of Merchandise.” Cigar dealer James Mendi of East 17th Street was also a Union Square dime museum freak show performer. Mendi delighted his audiences, including a fascinated physician from St. Marks Place, as Mendi banged gas pipes and iron pots over his rock-hard skull.

Dr. Tsiter talked Mendi into signing a contract for $500, payable in monthly installments, the terms of which required Mendi's estate to turn over his skull-bones to the good doctor if Mendi predeceased him, and otherwise to a medical institution designated in the doctor's will. Mendi thought the better of it after his buddies told him his head had started to shake after signing the contract, but upon complaining to a police captain at the 92nd Street station house of having been taken advantage of, the poor fellow was told that the courts were his only recourse. A goodly measure of news of fires and labor strife in the ghetto also filled the broadsheet, whose tone was closer to Pulitzer's yellow World than its future strident socialist voice.

In a move probably calculated to frustrate future creditors, Sol assigned his Ludlow lease to his wife thirteen months later, setting a pattern for his post-Prohibition life. On the Lower East Side or deep inside Russia, A Jewish boy stayed ahead of the law.

The couple apparently did well enough to sell the Ludlow Street saloon in 1908 right after renewing the lease, and moved to a larger tenement at 236 East Broadway when Sol began his liquor business at 71 Canal Street. Perhaps Sol even put his money in the Jarmulowsky's Bank. Before moving to the banking palace at Eldridge and Canal in 1912, Sender's two sons operated at 165 East Broadway, advertising their special services in Der Vorverts in a large display ad.



Trow's Directory also lists a Sol Goldberg in East Harlem as a bottler in 1909-10. The alcohol trade may have been an up and down one (or the 236 East Broadway apartment too small for an ever-growing family), because by 1911, Sol and his brood moved to 97 East Broadway where they lived with Rosa's unmarried milliner sisters Gertrude and Mollie.
#97 stands on a block that was permanently cast into shadow by the construction of the Manhattan Bridge and its 1909 opening. Here are Rosa and her two sisters, dressed to the nines !


THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE c. 1909





I found the front door unlocked to this rundown residence when I next returned to the neighborhood. I crept up #97's dirty stairs one landing at a time, camera in hand, anxious about a potentially violent encounter with someone who didn't speak English but knew I shouldn't be there. Recently used mattresses and cooking utensils were stowed on the landings, iron gates preventing access to the front doors of apartments that probably house groups of undocumented Fujianese who sleep there in shifts. Video cameras hung above locksets, feeding my face via webcam to who knows where. I skeedaddled after a very quick tour.

97 EAST BROADWAY – TODAY (front and hallway)






Several children were born to Sol and Rosa: Herbert in 1899, George Milton in 1904 and Helen in 1908. Here are photos of Herbert, George Milton and Helen, as well as their mother with the two oldest kids.







As Sol's liquor and saloon business prospered at 71 Canal, the family moved from 97 East Broadway to #259, a slightly newer structure, and then left the squalid and overcrowded East Side, moving first to a tenement on Rockaway Avenue in Brownsville and then to a sizable, newly-built attached brick house on Martense Court in central Flatbush. With the advent of the First World War and the August 1918 amendment to the prior year's Selective Service Act, all males between 18 and 45 years of age were required to register. One year under the limit, and clearly a poor choice for a return trip to Europe, Sol, a naturalized US citizen, did his duty anyway, but wasn't called. But even with the Versailles treaty inked and official, a live shell still landed, smack in his face.


259 EAST BROADWAY – TODAY (front and entryway)






1 MARTENSE COURT (left), TODAY



The Volstead Act of 1919 struck a violent blow to Sol and his family as well as tens of thousands of families, Jewish and gentile alike. All over America, alcohol went underground, and tens of thousands of formerly legal, respectable jobs disappeared. In America, Sol had followed a time-honored Jewish trade. Though barred from many professions in Eastern Europe, Jews had been tavern owners there at least since the 18th century, filling a strange function in Catholic-dominated societies where the "sin" of facilitating inebriation was pawned off on the unclean killers of Christ. The liquor trade also supported large-scale agriculture to produce the basic grains and potatoes that fed the distilleries and provided significant tax revenues to the state. The gradual tightening of Polish governmental restrictions on Jewish tavern keepers grew through the early 19th century, though, and they were forced into all sorts of extra-legal gymnastics to avoid starvation. With the closing of his hopeful "cafe and restaurant" at 71 Canal, Sol Goldberg would trod a well-worn path.

My research trail went very cold after 1920, Sol's name disappears from directories. His wife, who owned title to 1 Martense Court, sold the house in 1922, and it is unclear where the couple and their young adult and teenage children moved next. By 1930 they had landed at 80 Winthrop Street, not far from their Martense Court home in halcyon days. Listed as a "restaurant owner" on official documents until his dying day, I couldn't first figure Sol's sudden disappearance. What was he up to after the Volstead hammer blows rained down? Did Sol open a candy store, a luncheonette or a deli? None of the post-1920 Manhattan or Brooklyn phone books yielded a clue, and the trail of possible living relatives to question went very cold. After months of frustration and useless detours, I hired an expert and uncovered the truth.

In one day's work, a professional genealogist unlocked the secret, linking together a 1930 birth announcement in the New York Times together with a current Nevada phone number for a possible hit. Sol's estate administration papers, filed in Kings County Surrogate's Court at his death in 1943, list a widow and three children, among them one George Milton Gardner, who had changed his last name. I had already found George, back when his last name was Goldberg, living on East 21st in Manhattan when he married May Klein in a religious ceremony in 1925. On March 9, 1930, Mr. and Mrs. "Rube" Goldberg (nee May Klein) announced the birth on February 21st of that year of a son, Robert Allen. It was too close a coincidence. I'd found my man.

My voice trembled a bit as Allen Gardner answered the call. "How did you get my number?" an old man said. I tried to hide my own trepidation. Another person was listed at the Reno address, a Dar Es Salaam. Perhaps an Al Qaeda terrorist cell? After a bit, Allen warmed to my interest, being still careful about what he disclosed. 81 years old and retired from a distinguished career as an animal behaviorist, Allen and his late wife had taught the chimp Washoe to use sign language in 1969. I easily recognized the famous chimp's name. Talk about swag! Then we cut to the chase. When Allen was a baby, his parents would take him for rides in their car, traveling Brooklyn's leafy streets. The police never stopped a young couple with a baby. Even with cases of hooch on board. Milton and May did the deliveries. Sol handled the wholesalers. The family scraped by. Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein controlled the flow of juice to Sol's customers until Rothstein was rubbed out at the Park Central Hotel in 1928 and members of his minyan, Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, took control.

The sow's ear started morphing as I talked to Allen longer. The shape of a shtraymel began to appear. As with any raiment, these bonnets come in gradations. I ended up with the finest in the store. "Perhaps you heard of my late brother Herb?" the old man said. "He was a playwright, kinda well known." "Herb Gardner?" I shot back. "The name is familiar." "His last play was Conversations with My Father, not so very long ago."

My spine tingled like icicles on my bare neck in winter. I'd loved the show on Broadway in '92. Judd Hirsch played the lead roll, Eddie Goldberg. The set was a dingy bar on Canal Street, New York. As we talked more, my excitement only grew. Herb Gardner also authored A Thousand Clowns, I'm Not Rappaport, Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, and The Goodbye People. What a piece of true dumb luck. Blanks had been missing. The play, albeit fiction, fleshed a lot out. I nabbed it forthwith from the library stacks, eating the words off the pages, scarfing down the beak and the bones.

Sadness informs and infuses Conversations. In it Sol Goldberg is portrayed as an upright man whose insistence after Prohibition began on selling only legal near-beer and his refusal to deal with bootleggers got him murdered in Cortlandt Alley. The alley seems dangerous, perhaps moreso today: It runs south of Canal and west of Lafayette Streets, hard by the ancient loft buildings where upstairs warrens of dark storehouses harbor soft goods counterfeiters. Gullible tourists are robbed blind there now every day of the week.

CORTLANDT ALLEY, TODAY




Eddie Goldberg, modeled after Allen and Herb's father George Milton Goldberg (Gardner), is a tough-talking cynical barkeep and irascible father, slinging drinks in a low-end dive that he keeps remodeling and redecorating to try and attract a better clientele than the alkies and bums who drift in from the streets near the Tombs and the court houses. 8:00 a.m. each day finds a line at the door. The play, in truth, is a confabulation. Sol Goldberg played along with Rothstein and more. The year after Prohibition ended in 1933, Sol's wife, son Herbert and a fellow named Israel Civin from Borough Park, formed a corporation and leased a bar at 258 Canal Street, where McDonalds sits today. Strangely, Sol's name does not appear on the corporate formation documents, though the following year, trade name documents were filed in New York with Sol and without Mr. Civin, registering the trade name “Silver-Gate Restaurant” at 258 Canal Street, with Sol's younger son, George Milton Gardner (f/k/a Goldberg!) listed as an owner also.

258 CANAL STREET TODAY




The Silver Gate Bar and Grill operated there until Sol's death from cardiac failure and pulmonary edema on August 8, 1943, Dr,. Bertha Kalish pronounced Sol dead at Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn where he had lain for 12 days prior. Manhattan's Riverside Funeral Chapel handled the arrangements when Sol was buried at Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, Long Island, eleven days later. Why the delay is an open book. Rosa, his widow, did not last long. After suffering at their home at 57 Lincoln Road for six months from hyper-nephroma and hypertension under the care of her neighbor, Dr. Gustave Bers, Rosa passed away on May 2, 1944 and was buried along Sol the next day. Her son, George Milton, who had altered his surname to Gardner at least 20 months before, must have had a change of heart or felt guilty as the molokh hamoves, the angel of death, came knocking again at the family door. On Rosa's death certificate, he is listed as informant. George Milton Goldberg resumed his boyhood role.

57 LINCOLN ROAD TODAY



Sometimes success will skip generations. Sol's swift-footed career didn't end so well. The Silver Gate Bar was sold by his widow and two sons in 1945. His estate was probated with almost no value attached to his assets. Business at the Silver Gate must not have supported three households well. At Sol's death he and Rosa were still renting their home. At least the couple tried to do the sewing. For a Jew, pig skin is tough to cut and stitch. Though the end result of Sol Goldberg's Cafe was certainly no shtraymel, it still outshines many, its lettering still aglow.








EDITORIAL NOTE: The New York Times tells the background behind the creation of this piece at
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/chasing-a-name-lost-to-time-2/


FOR READERS WITH AN INTEREST IN RESEARCH TECHNIQUES USED IN THIS PROJECT,HERE IS A LIST OF ELECTRONIC AND OTHER RESOURCES: WHERE TO USE THEM AND IF FOR FREE

MAPS MAPS MAPS ! (FREE):
THE DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION: THIS TREASURE-HOUSE HAS 20,000 HISTORIC MAPS AND ITS INDEX IS TEXT SEARCHABLE

http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/view/all?res=1&sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort

BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE: (TEXT SEARCHABLE): FREE ONLINE:

http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/Default/Skins/BEagle/Client.asp?Skin=BEagle&AW=1306845851437&AppName=2&GZ=T

FULTON OLD NEWSPAPERS (TEXT SEARCHABLE) FREE ONLINE; PAPERS INCLUDE MANY OLD NEW YORK CITY NEWSPAPERS INCLUDING ONES NOT PUBLISHED FOR MANY DECADES

http://www.fultonhistory.com/my%20photo%20albums/all%20newspapers/index.html

http://www.fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html


NY TIMES (TEXT SEARCHABLE) USE FOR FREE AT NYPL

NY HERALD TRIBUNE (TEXT SEARCHABLE) (NYPL ONSITE ONLY: USE FOR FREE)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: THE AMERICAN MEMORY COLLECTION IS SEARCHABLE, ONLINE, FREE, AND CONTAINS ZILLIONS OF EVERY KIND OF ARCHIVAL RESOURCE INCLUDING SOUND AND FILM THAT YOU CAN IMAGINE.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

CORNELL OLD MAGAZINE AND BOOK COLLECTIONS: CONTAINS TEXT SEARCHABLE ARCHIVE OF 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURY US MAGAZINES AND MANY ODD BOOKS: FREE, ONLINE

http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/

GOOGLE BOOKS

FOOTNOTE.COM (USE FOR FREE AT NYPL) http://www.footnote.com/

THIS SITE CONTAINS DOCUMENT COLLECTIONS ESPECIALLY STRONG IN US MILITARY RECORDS INCLUDING VETERANS PENSIONS

NYPL FREE ONLINE DIGITAL IMAGES http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm

BROOKLYN HISTORICAL SOCIETY ON-SITE IMAGES ELECTRONIC CATALOG AND link to SELECTED ONLINE images as well as books etc. in collections:
http://www.brooklynhistory.org/library/search.html

NYC HOUSING AUTHORITY WAGNER ARCHIVE LaGuardia Community College; THIS ARCHIVES HAS A HUGE NUMBER OF PHOTOS OF NYCHA SITES BEFORE AND DURING DEMOLITION FROM 1933- RECENT FOR NYCHA PROJECTS. IT'S A HISTORY OF THE SITES, SOME OF WHICH ARE HUGE.

general info: http://www.laguardiawagnerarchive.lagcc.cuny.edu/PhotosVirtualExhibit/TourP1.asp?TourPage=1

search page:
http://www.laguardiawagnerarchive.lagcc.cuny.edu/defaultb.htm

NYHS BOBCAT AND ON-SITE IMAGES COLLECTION
http://www.bobcat.nyu.edu:1701/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=NYHS&reset_config=true&

MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NY FREE ONLINE IMAGES CATALOG http://collections.mcny.org/MCNY/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MNY_HomePage

OTHER RESOURCES:

CHURCH RECORDS: CHURCH RECORDS DATING BACK TO THE 18TH CENTURY ARE AVAILABLE IN MANY LOCATIONS THROUGHOUT THE METROPOLITAN AREA. THESE ARE CRITICAL RECORDS OF LIFE-CYCLE EVENTS AS WELL AS EDUCATION IN MANY CASES. WHERE TO START IS AT THE NYPL GENEALOGY SECTION AT 42ND STREET AND FIFTH AVENUE ON THE FIRST FLOOR. TELL THEM WHAT YOU KNOW AND WHAT YOU WANT AND THEY WILL GUIDE YOU TO THE RIGHT PLACES IN THE METRO AREA TO SEARCH, AND PERHAPS START YOU OFF WITH THE INVALUABLE WPA GUIDES TO CHURCH RECORDS IN NYC PUBLISHED IN 1940, ON THEIR SHELVES.

FEDERAL ARCHIVES NYC OFFICE: 212 401 1620 TELEPHONE INQUIRIES TAKEN ON FEDERAL LITIGATION INCLUDING FEDERAL CRIMINAL CASES IN THE FIVE BOROUGHS

INTERNET ATTENTION TO YOUR WORK: I HAVE HAD THE MOST MARVELOUS RESEARCH FINDS ONCE I STARTED POSTING MY WORK ON SEVERAL PROJECTS ON A BLOG. PEOPLE GOOGLE THEIR FAMILY NAMES AND BINGO YOU GET CONTACTED BY INTERESTED INDIVIDUALS, REALTIVES ETC THAT CAN ADD A HUGE AMOUNT TO YOUR PROJECT. I'VE BEEN CONTACTED 0UT OF CYBERSPACE MANY TIMES NOW WITH INFORMATION AND IMAGES FROM RELATIVES OF MY QUARRY WHO HAVE ADDED EMORMOUSLY TO MY WORK.