Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  Miss New York City contestants, 1961.

  I had a small single room with one window that looked out onto Lexington Avenue. It had a sink, but the bathroom and showers were down the hall. Every day a maid in a black-and-white uniform came and made up my room. A doorman let me in and out of the hotel. An elevator lady, who wore the kind of form that Shirley MacLaine wore in The Apartment, took me up to my room on the 17th floor. She knew all the Gibbs girls and would always speak to us.

  The Gibbs girls were highly identifiable. We were required to wear a hat, white gloves, and shoes with one-inch heels. Our hair had to be cut short enough so that it did not fall below the collar of our jacket. And we always wore suits. I bought five wool tailored suits from Best & Company and a Chesterfield coat. We got all dressed up every day.

  Women taking the qualifying exam for the NYPD, 1947.

  Five days a week, the Barbizon provided us with breakfast and dinner in the private Gibbs dining room on the second floor. We’d come down in the morning dressed in our suits, sit at a round table with white tablecloths and white cloth napkins, and be served our breakfast on china plates with silver flatware.

  Then we’d either hail a cab or walk down to the subway on 59th by Bloomingdale’s and take the IRT to Grand Central Station. Katharine Gibbs classes were held on the fourth floor of the New York Central Station Building. This was just when they were beginning to build the Pan Am Building right behind us. We took classes five days a week from 9:00 to 3:30 with an hour for lunch, two hours of stenography and transcription, an hour of something called business communication, and two hours of typing on a manual typewriter. While we typed, the teacher stood up in front and pounded a walking stick on the floor so we would type in time to her rhythm. Then she checked our work, never missing a typo or erasure.

  All the teachers were women of the sort my father would call battle-axes. The first six weeks I was there I thought I was in basic training. But our business communication instructor, a six-feet-tall opera singer who had a master’s degree in psychology, was probably the best teacher I ever had. She trained us to do the quarter fold with the New York Times so as to be able to read the newspaper on the subway without disturbing the person next to us.

  The girls in the dormitory came from all over, a good number from the South. Quite a few were college graduates. But there were also girls who commuted from their homes in the boroughs of New York. Most of them had not gone to college and had the New York accent that needed refining. They were at Katharine Gibbs because they wanted to get a decent job. Being a secretary then was a coveted job for a woman. For some, it meant getting in on the ground floor, from which it was possible to move up.

  It was a kind of finishing school. They stressed good manners. You were expected to be professional, polite, and to know your job. We were taught never to let the phone ring more than three times. On the third ring you should be on that phone saying, “May I help you?” That was part of the image.

  Lunchtime, we mingled with the midtown Manhattan crowd, although in our suits, hats, and gloves, everyone could tell we were Katie Gibbs girls. We would try to walk a few blocks away from the school, away from the teachers who were watching out for the girls who took off their hats or gloves. If you got caught, it meant a demerit.

  There was this sense of “Here I am in Manhattan, all dressed up and going down Lexington or Park Avenue.” I knew that East 63rd and Lexington was a high-class, big-name district, that Gypsy Rose Lee and Katherine Hepburn were my neighbors. At times it seemed like I was wandering around on the set of a movie, living in this hotel, getting dressed up every day. The Barbizon had a small drugstore with a little cosmetic area and a lunch counter. Every so often I’d have lunch there, a BLT on toast with mayo and a cherry coke. So New York. The people behind the counter would talk to me. “How’s school? How is it going?”

  When a girlfriend of mine turned eighteen, which was the legal drinking age then, we went to the Biltmore Hotel, sat down at the bar and had martinis with olives. It was a status thing. Standing-room tickets to see a Broadway show cost two bucks. From the back of the orchestra I saw Ethel Merman in Gypsy, Mary Martin in The Sound of Music, and Dick Van Dyke in Bye Bye Birdie.

  It wasn’t until much later that I realized that year in Manhattan was a crossroads moment. We Katharine Gibbs girls were learning on manual typewriters, but the IBM Selectric electric typewriter was coming out. Young ladies were expected to wear hats and gloves. Gentlemen still opened doors for us and lit our cigarettes. But all of that was beginning to change as well.

  On a beautiful day in May 1961, I graduated from Katharine Gibbs. I was still very young, but I had learned a lot during my year in New York: how to fend for myself, how to get around on the subways and the buses, how to take in the life of the city. For me, there was a sense of wonderment and power that came from being a part of it.

  There was a terrace on the 22nd floor that went all around the top of the Barbizon Hotel. The afternoon of my graduation day, I went up there and walked around the perimeter, looking out at the gorgeous New York City skyscape, and I did not want to leave.

  3

  If I Can Make It Here . . .

  SAUL ZABAR: Henry Morgan was a humorist who lived on the Upper West Side and had a radio program. “Meet you in front of the cigar store,” he’d always say. There used to be a cigar store on the corner of Broadway and 80th. Everybody passed by it. If you stood outside that cigar store long enough, you’d meet everybody you’d ever want to meet. Today, if you stand outside Zabar’s, you’ll probably meet everybody you’d ever want to meet.

  My father, Louis Zabar, came to America from Ostropolia, a shtetl in the Ukraine, in 1923. At that time, there were public markets in Brooklyn where stalls could be rented. Almost immediately my father got a stall and went into the produce business. How he did it, I don’t know. He didn’t have any money. But he’d been very important to his father’s business, and so he knew what to do. In the mid-twenties, he married my mother, Lillian, who had come here earlier from the same town in the Ukraine, and then he got into the smoked fish business.

  In 1934, when I was six and my brother Stanley was two, he heard about an appetizing counter that was available on the Upper West Side. It was in a Daitch Dairy, a fairly large store noted for its cheese. He rented the counter, and we moved to an apartment on Amsterdam Avenue and 81st Street.

  After a few years, the owner of Daitch decided to sell. My father bought the store, probably on notes because he didn’t have that kind of money. Now he owned an entire store, maybe twenty-five hundred square feet. The fish department was on one side, the cheese department was on the other side, and the grocery department was in the back.

  East of Broadway to Columbus was Irish, but along Central Park West and from Riverside Drive to Broadway, from 72nd Street to about 86th Street, was an affluent Jewish area. The store developed a big charge account trade from the well-to-do people in the neighborhood, a lot of telephone orders and deliveries. George Gershwin, Fannie Brice, Babe Ruth were among the customers.

  Then came the war period, and everything boomed. In 1941, my father moved his store down the block to the present Zabar’s location at 2245 Broadway and 80th Street, the portion where the deli and appetizing departments are today. He was a very smart, very active businessman.

  They had the Blue Laws then, which didn’t allow retail establishments to be open for the full day on Sundays. We could only be open from nine to eleven in the morning and from four to seven in the afternoon. It was hard to get personnel to work those hours so Stanley and I had to come in. I worked in the cheese department, where we sold sour cream and sweet cream by the dipper; butter, which came in blocks that we had to cut; Swiss cheese; American cheese; Munster cheese; a little bit of Brie; different cheddar cheeses.

  In 1949, my father got very sick. I was a student at the University of Kansas at the time, but when I found out my father was sick, I came back to New York. He died the next year at the
age of forty-nine. I thought I would spend a couple of years in New York and then go back to school. But that was not to be.

  It’s now the late 1950s. Stanley has graduated from law school and left the business to practice law. My father left his family comfortable. My mother has her own money; it isn’t necessary for me to support her. My youngest brother, Eli, is provided for. I’m running the store, but I want to change my lifestyle.

  Then one day Murray Klein appears on the scene. He was a survivor who managed to escape from the Germans and the Russians. After the war he wound up in a DP camp in Italy where he learned Italian and ran a business in the camp. He came to work for me as a stock man. He was so talented and capable that he soon became manager. After a while, he got married and went into business for himself.

  This day he was passing by and came into the store. I said to him, “Murray what are you doing?” He wasn’t doing much. “Come on,” I said, “join us.” At first he said he didn’t want to, but then he agreed.

  Murray was really the founder of Zabar’s as it exists today. He had a sense of humor; he liked to talk to celebrities. There was always something smart, but not offensive, coming out of his mouth. Murray was able to put everything together.

  With Murray around, I became the outside buyer, doing the fish buying, the cheese buying. I was married by this time and had a family. I was able to take off on the weekends and do whatever I had to do by phone. Klein was the overall head.

  Then my brother Stanley came back into the operation. He provided the more sophisticated aspects, like importing the cheeses from France, the olive oils. And we began servicing a new breed of customer who wanted the kinds of foods that were not generally available. Klein had briefly been in the housewares business, so he founded the mezzanine section and trained the people.

  Now we’re into the 1960s. The food revolution is taking place. We’re becoming aware of European tradition, the cheeses, the breads. This is the time of the so-called caviar wars with the big department stores like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, who had very good food departments. They undercut us; we undercut them. There was a lot of publicity. This was also the time of David’s Cookies. Everybody was baking cookies. Zabar’s had become a big family enterprise with a lot of interconnected people. By 1975, we had bought the surrounding buildings and broken through, and Zabar’s was the property it is today. Why did it become the institution it became? You had a combination of three very smart people: me, my brother Stanley, and Murray Klein. I don’t think my father ever dreamed this would happen.

  MARK FEDERMAN: The day Japan formally surrendered to the United States on September 2, 1945, was the day I was born on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side, about a block from the smoked fish store belonging to my grandfather, Joel Russ. He had come to this country from Galicia and soon afterwards got into the herring business. The Eastern European Jews had brought the taste for herring with them. Herring was a staple, and it cost pennies. They would pick one out, wrap it up in the newspaper of the day, which was generally the Forward, and with some onions and potatoes make a meal for a whole family out of it.

  Originally my grandfather sold herring off a horse and wagon. Then he had a pushcart. In 1914, he opened up his own store on Orchard Street. By the early twenties, he had moved to the present location on Houston Street. In those days there were probably three or four of those kinds of stores on every block of the Lower East Side.

  He had that Eastern European style typical of very bright, self-taught, hardworking people who put in fifteen hours a day, but had little patience. No self-respecting Jew would ever buy a fish off the top of the pile. They wanted herring from the bottom of the barrel. My grandfather threw many a customer like that out of the store.

  Grandpa Russ had no sons, but he did have three pretty daughters—Hattie, Ida, and Anne—and because of them the store prospered. As soon as they were in high school, they began helping out. You had these three good-looking teenage girls picking herrings out of barrels and slicing lox. Who was going to argue with them? Customers would fall in love with every piece of fish they laid on the counter. That freed my grandfather to do what he could do best: buy quality fish. Every morning, he drove his truck across the Williamsburg Bridge to be at the smokehouses in Brooklyn by four a.m., when the fish came out of the ovens.

  The store became known for the quality of the fish and the three pretty daughters who sold it. People came from all over. The daughters met their husbands through the store. All three sons-in-law came to work in the business, and all the families lived together under the control of my grandfather.

  When I was around five or six, Grandpa Russ moved everybody out to Far Rockaway. He thought the sea air would be good for our health. The whole deal then was to move out; nobody wanted to live on the Lower East Side. But as soon as we were old enough, all the grandchildren were brought into the store to work on a rotating basis. This was the late fifties, early sixties. They paid us what seemed like a lot of money, but we would have rather been playing ball with our friends.

  We were never allowed to work behind the fish counter. They put us on the other side, behind the dried fruit, nuts, and candy. Somehow there was always a connection between all of that and smoked fish. There were chocolate halvah squares, orange and red marmalade with chocolate sprinkles, real apricot shoe leather, a confection of prune and apricot with marshmallow in between wrapped in cellophane. You can’t get that itemanymore. The guy who made it died, and that was it.

  At some point in the mid-fifties, the middle daughter and her husband were having trouble getting along with my grandfather. They moved out to Long Island and set up their own smoked fish business. So by the time I started working in the store, it was basically Grandpa Russ, my parents, my aunt and uncle, and the kids who came in one or two at a time on the weekends. Although Grandpa Russ was not moving around too much by now, everyone was still afraid of him. Dressed in a three-piece tailored suit and a cane with gold handle, he would sit in an old red leather chair near the candy counter, and watch everything. “Nisht a zoy! [Not like that!],” he would say; nothing positive ever came out of him. But it was his store until he died.

  On Saturdays, Russ and Daughters would get very busy in the evening after the Yiddish Theater on Second Avenue let out. The audience, the actors, the producers—they all came to buy the bagels and lox and herring that Jews eat on Sundays. We had to stay open way past midnight, until one, two in the morning.

  On Sundays, the scene was extraordinary. It was mobbed, and no one had come up with the idea of taking numbers yet. Everybody would cry, “I’m next, I’m next.” And they all waited for their “see you’s”—the particular person they wanted to wait on them. Be it my mother or my father or my aunt or my uncle, each customer had his or her favorite; they were in to “see you.” This wasn’t “Give me a quarter pound of nova” and you’re out. This was like your special salesperson had a special chub in the back that she saved just for you.

  Overall the Lower East Side was dead on Saturdays because the Jewish-owned businesses closed for the Sabbath. On Sundays, however, the area was teeming. I don’t think my family ever shopped on Orchard Street. They were not from the shoppers; they were from the sellers, and besides, they had no time to shop. But Orchard Street was booming with the many little stores in the small buildings. The pushcarts were gone by this time—they weren’t considered sanitary—but there was the big market on Essex Street with all the stalls. Because of its Jewish nature, the Lower East Side was exempted from the Blue Laws that kept businesses closed on Sundays. And that was what enabled the neighborhood to thrive economically. It was when the Blue Laws were abolished and the suburban malls stayed open on Sundays that the Lower East Side started to decline.

  My parents inculcated in me the feeling that the Lower East Side was not a neighborhood to live in, and that the smoked fish business was not one to be in. They worked very hard, put in long hours on their feet in a place that did not have good heating or refrig
eration. Every night the showcases had to be taken apart, and all the food had to be put away in the back. I remember them scrubbing, moving things around.

  They were into survival. It wasn’t glamorous. They didn’t have a chance to sit down, much less sit back. They figured they would raise their kids and educate them so that they would not have to go into this business. We all went on to college. I became a lawyer.

  By the mid-seventies, my aunt and uncle had retired. My father developed a heart condition and thought of selling the store. It was a down time for the city. Russ and Daughters continued to do business because of its loyal Jewish clientele, but the customers had all moved from the neighborhood. The vibrancy was not what it had been. We were in a flat period, and there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel because of the changed demographics. The political powers of New York basically abandoned the Lower East Side, which was receiving new immigrants that the city was not paying attention to.

  Nevertheless, it was at this time that I decided to take over the store. My work as a trial lawyer had become all-consuming. I’d come home at night, my wife would be talking about the kids, and my mind would be on what I’d be doing at the trial the next day. Now I thought I would give up my job at the fancy firm and still practice law privately on the side. As it turned out, the first day I came into Russ and Daughters as its owner was the last day I practiced law.

  I bought out the other family members because I knew I couldn’t have anybody telling me what to do from afar. But for a while the question seemed to be what was going to last longer, the business or me. I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. Here I am, this cocky lawyer telling the old Jewish countermen I inherited how to run the business. There was a virtual war. On top of that, fish is the most demanding, finicky product in the world. And the customers are the most demanding in the world. They take your kishkas with every sale. “I want you to slice it like this, not too thin, not too thick; give me a half of a quarter of a pound.” And for years the neighborhood was the pits. I treaded water for quite a while. But I was afraid of changing anything, afraid the ghosts of Christmas past would get to me.