From Russia with Love: A 1st Generation Cobbler and a 3rd Generation Educator

Erik Shoemaker spends most of his day behind the counter of his tiny shop on Grand Street, surrounded by boxes of shoes, jars of polish, hammers, buffers, and every tool needed to fix shoes no matter how tattered and broken. Erik moved to New York City from Russia when he was a teenager, and he quickly learned his family's trade. When he opened Erik Shoe Repair twenty-four years ago, he became a third-generation cobbler.

Erik repairing shoes at his Lower East Side store.

Erik and his family decided to leave Russia with a simple goal: to have a better life. After staying in Israel, they arrived in New York City in the 1980s. For him, the adjustment was fairly easy, because he could practice Judaism.

"You go freely to pray and wear a yarmulke without worrying," he says, comparing the US to his homeland. "It was the time of communism in Russia," and most religious practices were banned.

His faith is what brought him to the Lower East Side. When he first arrived in New York City, he learned to repair shoes with his brother-in-law on Fourteenth Street. He decided to open his shop further downtown because it was a predominately Jewish neighborhood at the time. He was able to speak Hebrew while he was learning English.

Erik has seen the Lower East Side change frequently and suddenly over the years. His Jewish community started moving to Queens and Long Island. Then there was a larger wave of Chinese immigrants. Lately, his customers have been mainly Americans and Europeans from the East Village, who he calls "the village people" with a slight smile. Despite all the changes, Erik still likes working in the neighborhood. "It's quiet," he says.

And Erik is certainly well known around here. In 2007, New York Magazine named him the best shoe repair shop in the Lower East Side. His award is proudly displayed on his door. He says he won because he's "fast, and I do a good job." How fast? The article says that Erik once did a reheeling job while a taxi idled on the sidewalk.

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Back at the museum, Kathryn Lloyd, an educator who has led all of the Tenement Museum's building and neighborhood tours, also has a history deeply rooted in Eastern Europe and the Lower East Side, though hers begins with her great grandparents. Listen as she discusses how her family directly influenced her career as an educator and the way in which she approaches the hardships of immigration, past and present.

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Want to know more about Russian and other Eastern European immigrants on the Lower East Side? Get the details on The Moores: An Irish Family in America, in which the title family is compared to the Russian-Jewish Katz family, or the tour Kathryn says is closest to her own family's history - Piecing It Together - here.

- Article by Kiley Edgley and Joe Klarl

Questions for Curatorial: Basement Businesses

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

Did another business occupy the basement storefront adjacent to Schneider’s saloon during the late 1860s and 1870s?

According to the 1873 New York City Business Directory, 97 Orchard Street resident Heinrich Dreyer operated a real estate office with his partner, Christian Stark, in the building’s basement storefront.

A longtime real estate agent in Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany, Hanover-born Heinrich Dreyer frequently listed commercial properties for sale in German-language newspapers such as the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung.

By 1873, Dreyer appears to have partnered with Wurttemberg-born Christian Stark. Available records indicate that in 1873, 28-year-old Stark lived with his mother, brother, and two sisters at 45 Forsyth Street.

Interestingly, the 1870 US Census indicates that Stark had previously owned a local liquor store. How did he get into the real estate business? Evidence suggests that, in 1870, his mother Catherine owned $20,000 worth of real estate. It is possible that she helped her son invest and enabled him to partner with Heinrich Dreyer.

More recent architectural probes in 97 Orchard Street's basement strongly suggests that the saloon took up the entire basement space. Therefore, it's likely that Dreyer and Stark operated their business out of the bar, which was a gathering space and often used for political meetings and social events.

Tomorrow, read about a few of the businesses that operated out of 97 Orchard in the early 20th century.

A Neighborhood Champ

Our readers might be interested to head over to The Lo-Down blog to read a fine piece on G&S Sporting Goods of 43 Essex Street, which was founded in 1937 by Izzy Zerling, a professional boxer and trainer who immigrated here in 1922. His family lived above the store for about twenty years, and his wife made all the boxing gear they sold in the store. Today his son still runs to business.

Below are some wonderful photos of the store along with Len Zerling's oral history of the family business.




Photos are by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis; special thanks to Traven @ The Lo-Down for letting us repost.

Historic Signage, part II

Part Two of Derya's post on the old signs hanging in the windows of 97 Orchard is now up on Bowery Boogie. Go read about the Louis Chock underwear store!

Shop Signs in the Windows of 97 Orchard

Derya Golpinar, our collections manager, and Dave Favaloro, our research manager, collaborated on two posts for the Bowery Boogie blog on the signs now gracing the windows of 97 Orchard Street. We used two signs from our collection - one for Feltly Hats and one for Chock, Inc. Head over to Bowery Boogie to read the first post today, on Minding the Store and the history of Feltly Hats.

Opening and Closing - Guss' Pickles

A look at mom and pop shops that are leaving the neighborhood, and the businesses that are replacing them.



It's all over the local blogosphere: Guss' Pickles, the 90-year-old neighborhood staple on the corner of Broome and Orchard, is on its way out - to a larger, cheaper storefront in Brooklyn. Rent was getting too high, Lo-Down reports, and "when the city put a Muni Meter directly in front of [owner Patricia Fairhurst's] pickle barrels, blocking customers' access, it was the last straw."

Guss' may be famous for surviving decades of gentrification and demographic shifts, but it isn't the only place to buy briny cucumbers east of the Bowery. A quick browse on the web turned up a couple of relative newcomers that stay faithful to old-school preparation techniques (and may become, decades from now, the new neighborhood classics):

Pickle Guys
At his store on Essex Street (once the center of the neighborhood pickle industry), Alan Kaufman makes pickles from "an old Eastern European recipe, just as my mom used to make them." At one point, he even got a chance to work with one of the owners of Guss' Pickles.

Rick's Picks
Founder Rick Field, a former TV producer, translated a childhood hobby into a business in 2004. His artisinal corn, beet, and green bean pickles are fancier and less traditional than Pickle Guys' or Guss', but they stem from family recipes and are a regular fixture at the annual International Pickle Festival on Orchard Street.

-posted by Liana Grey

Twilight Thursday Profile - Wendy Mink Jewelry

Shop managers participating in our Twilight Thursdays program, in which tickets for special evening tours double as coupons for local businesses, share their thoughts on the surrounding neighborhood.


Store manager Kelly Christy outside Wendy Mink Jewelry on Orchard between Broome and Grand. Photo courtesy of Google Images.

Wendy Mink likes the Lower East Side so much that she shuttered her jewelry store in the West Village a year and a half ago and moved it to Orchard Street. Most days, she's too busy designing earrings and bracelets alongside a team of Tibetan artisans in her TriBeCa studio to spend much time in the neighborhood. (Her work is inspired by travels to the Indian subcontinent and flea markets in Europe.)

But I spoke with one of the shop's managers, Kelly Christy, at the boutique just south of the museum. Her thoughts on the neighborhood: "It keeps changing, but it still has its heart and soul." Locals seem to accept its shifting nature, she said, and because "people who live here shop here" - particularly younger residents and teachers who work at nearby schools - its a good place to run a small business.

Kelly herself is a milliner, and has a studio in the back of the store. She sells some of her hats alongside Wendy's jewelry, and did the reverse when she ran a shop of her own (now shuttered) in TriBeCa. The two artists met through a mutual friend 19 years ago, not long after Wendy first launched her collection, and fast became buddies after taking a martial arts class together.

The economic climate has changed a lot since then - but Kelly ensured me that her longtime friend is doing well and "has a good following."

More info: Check out the store's new blog and Twitter page.

Opening & Closing - Hudson Street Papers

A look at small businesses in the Lower East Side that have shuttered, or are about to, and what's moving into the neighborhood to replace them.

If you've ever passed by Hudson Street Papers on Orchard Street between Stanton and Rivington, you might have wondered what the tiny stationary shop was doing outside the West Village. Turns out its owner moved it from across town a short while ago and shut the store down at the end of last month after realizing, as he told Curbed, that "the Lower East Side is bad news." The vacant space (once home to cards, stamps, and quirky items, like freezy freakie mittens - see a former customer's review) is for rent by Misrahi Realty, whose strip mall-like retail center under construction about a block away contributed, perhaps, to the owner's changing impression of the neighborhood.

-posted by Liana Grey

A Tour of Neighborhood Bookstores

Museum shop manager Katherine Broadway guest blogs about her favorite places to browse for books on the Lower East Side.

Book lovers worldwide have heard of The Strand and its 18 miles of used and new books up near Union Square, but the Lower East Side still has some bookstore gems that haven’t fallen victim to the recession. Our bookstore at the Tenement Museum has a wide selection of books on New York history and immigration, including a fantastic (if I do say so myself) children and young adult section. For a taste of New York bookselling at its finest, check out some of my other downtown favorites.



Just blocks from the Tenement Museum on Allen Street (just south of Houston) is Bluestockings, one of the last radical bookstores left in the city. A haven for socialists, hipsters, and all those who don’t fit in elsewhere, Bluestockings combines a wide selection of queer and feminist theory, radical political tomes, and homemade zines with a diverse fiction section. Check out their calendar of events, packed with happenings almost every night, and be sure to pick up a vegan treat from the café.


The first time I set foot inside St. Mark’s Bookshop(on 3rd Ave between 8th and 9th Streets), I fell in love. The high ceilings, bookshelves reaching far above my head, and old-fashioned rolling ladders made me feel like I was in the private library of some rich old aristocrat. This is the kind of bookstore where you can spend hours tucked into a nook, dipping into as many books as you please. And they are open until midnight, so you won’t be rushed out.

Opening and Closing - Streit's Matzos

Historic LES stores that have shuttered (or are about to), and the businesses that are replacing them.



The boxes of Streit's Matzo stacked in supermarkets across the country every Passover are produced not in China or along the Jersey Turnpike, but in an 84-year-old factory on Rivington and Suffolk Streets. Founded by European immigrant Aron Streit in 1916 and passed down to his granddaughters and great-grandsons, the iconic company is one of few mom and pop manufacturing firms left on Manhattan. With a grip on about 40% of the U.S. matzo market, it's still going strong. Rumor has it, though, that the factory has been put up for sale for $25 million for the second time in two years; the owners, who were initially reluctant to give up a piece of Lower East Side history, have struggled to find a buyer. (The business isn't closing, just moving elsewhere.) Because it lacks landmark status, the 47,500 square foot building could turn into just about anything if a deal goes through. Condos? A new Whole Foods? Your guess is as good as mine.

If you drop by 148-154 Rivington Street, workers (many of Puerto Rican rather than Eastern European heritage, in a testament to the neighborhood's changing demographics) might hand you some matzo samples.