Jews of Brooklyn - Williamsburg

On the street curb, when the days are cold, some merchant will set a pail of burning coals to warm his fellows, who bless him as they toast their shins beside the welcome blaze, reminding them of the customs of far away Bohemia.

The sidewalks are cluttered up with boxes and barrels for half their width, so that much business is done in the gutter, often partially filled with refuse straw, banana skins and sweepings.

Everybody is buying something, but in such small quantities! One cent each for cups and saucers, nicked beyond endurance for sensitive lips; fruit that dodged the inspector, scraps of half burned muslin from somebody’s wet down stock—all to be had for the smallest piece of money current. And yet the people have money to spare, for when the writer was there a Punch and Judy show actually caught pennies, money that was on its way to the bakeshop or the corner stand.

In the morning the crowd buys bread, cake and vegetables. In the afternoon, herring—two for five cents, large ones for eight cents—and chicken! Not a whole bird, but a chunk—a wing, a leg, the breast or neck, for a nickel to a dime. The skill with which, by a dab into a fish or a pinch of the poultry, the women can pick out the best pieces in sight is marvellous, and makes them either a purchaser or a scoffer.

One of the health inspectors volunteered the remark that the Jewish housewife was a born connoisseur of poultry, and that, in spite of the close buying and economic habits, they always ate well at home.

In their methods of trading, the feature that strikes an outsider most is their utter indifference to appearances in the methods of displaying stock and attracting customers. There is no attempt to fix up counters or booths, to make them presentable. The store front windows have glass cracked and dirty, the clapboards are falling off; shutters a-swing; everything inside awry. Side passages are choked up with old truck, as if a fire had caused a pell-mell precipitation of everything movable from the windows above.

In one areaway, an old gilt chair, three good but rain soaked trunks and a broken keg of nails, all rusty and scattered about, disputed entrance to a shop. All about was that disregard to “keeping things up” that Americans consider indispensable to thrift.

And yet, all these people have money. The Magie-toothed old woman in a doorway who, bundled up in three shawls, sold chickens with a hatchet, and was every ready to hack off a wing for a nickel or browbeat a close customer, in making change pulled out from beneath her spattered skirts a dirty bag with bills enough in sight to send her to Prague and back!

It is difficult to believe the amount of business done in this rude fashion. On the corner of Moore-st. and Manhattan-ave., under the wooden awning of a grocery store, is a conglomeration of small traders in bread, cakes, oranges, vegetables, lace curtains, cloths and notions, and all are doing a rushing business. The prices they pay for the privilege of standing there in the cold to barter are astonishing. The hearty, oily-capped Pole who sells herring from four barrels on the exact corner, on the narrow ledge nearest the store window, pays $25 per month for his stand. No counter, no shelves—just four barrels of pickled herrings and a pile of old newspapers between his legs. There he stands all day, with his fingers diving into the brine for his petty trade—but he owns two houses in the neighborhood. The old woman nearby pays $15, and another $10, and so on—all enough to pay the store rent inside.

The former myriads of pushcarts are now turned off Manhattan-ave. into Cook-st., to its improvement financially, as the stores complained they cut too heavily into their business. When one is in a jam like that always about this corner, thoughts of pestilence and microbes get troublesome and one feels easier to get out into the street, away a bit from contagion.

All kinds of trade are found here in activity, but conducted in such ways that only their own people care to patronize them. A carpenter’s kit is all broken and chipped and tools with handles gone lie about. Furniture is mended with strings, windows patched up with pasteboard or tin, and in one case a stove cover was held in place by the leg of a rocking chair, the back of which had broken through the sash above, shattering two more panes of glass now stuffed with paper.

Squalor and shiftlessness are revealed everywhere. Yet when the rent collector comes the roll of bills is put back into the pocket and the rent paid in silver and pennies. They have money left.

The mixture of trades is somewhat curious. A woman outdoors selling corsets and ribbons had two crates of suspicious-looking eggs to sell. A broken bric-a-brac wagon had stale oranges on the tailboard, and so at once appealed to aesthetic and epicurean tastes.

There was a collection of shirtwaists and men’s trousers, so flimsy that a breath of cold air would almost have shrunk them to fit the baby. Cotton shirts were on sale, that pass in one season from father to son, and the same huckster sold bureau cover for six cents, that seemingly would have made the furniture warp, so violent were the contrasts in colors.

The one inharmonious element in the scene is the constant presence of the “whitewing brigade,” which struggles to keep the streets clean; but it is powerless to keep ahead of the incessant dumpings from yards, doors, cellars, and the windows.

How do they make money in such an environment? They have it. There is no doubt about that. They eat well, but they sleep in crowded rooms, unless watched closely by the Health Department, and they never spend unless it comes back!

In this locality there are 20,000 to 25,000 Jews, and they pay $10 to $12 for a floor of four or five rooms, or $12 to $18 for a flat of four rooms. A family consists of from five to nine persons, with one or two or more boarders, generally some relative, and all sleep somewhere in their confined quarters. The boarder’s money is made to pay for the food for the whole family, with a lift on the rent. One of the children, or the wife, has to stand somewhere, and makes the rest of the rent and the clothes and the “incidentals.” The husband and older children’s wages are put away in the family hoard or invested in land. In a few years they have a shop, and then rent the front steps, the space under the stoop, or the front windows, to pay the rent. All that is made in the store is put away. “Every Jew in ‘Dutchtown’ is a real estate agent,” said a prominent Broadway broker, and the tales told daily carry out this statement. One huckster bought a piece of property in the quarter recently on a Monday for $24,000, and sold it the next Thursday, without seeing it, for $28,000. Another six years ago paid $12,000 for some houses and recently refused $64,000 for the same, and his clothes, hat and boots would not bring $2.30. In foreign countries and in ancient times this disregard of personal appearance concealed riches and protected from oppression and taxes, but here there is no need of this deception, yet Old World habits cling.

Courtesy of Steven Lasky, museumoffamilyhistory.com