Read Online 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman - Free Book Online
Authors: Jane Ziegelman
Tags: United States, General, Social Science, History, Cooking, New York, New York (State), State & Local, 19th century, Middle Atlantic, Nutrition, N.Y.), Immigrants, Social History, Emigration & Immigration, Agriculture & Food, History - U.S., History: American, United States - 19th Century, Food habits, United States - State & Local - Middle Atlantic, United States - State & Local - General, Lower East Side (New York, New York - Local History
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The Academy of Music closed in 1886, forced out of business by the newly built Metropolitan Opera House. In time, the rest of the theaters followed suit. Some closed permanently, others moved uptown to the more fashionable entertainment district around 42nd Street. Robbed of their customers, the saloons vanished too. Incredibly, Luchow’s managed to hang on until 1982, haunting 14th Street like a stranded visitor from another time.
The journey from Ermich’s lunch room to Pfaff’s to Luchow’s traced a rough semicircle that skirted the edges of Kleindeutschland . All three establishments played a major part in the transmission of German food ways to mainstream America. The frankfurters and hamburgers eaten in similar nineteenth-century German restaurants have become so thoroughly assimilated that we hardly recognize them as German at all. Within Kleindeutschland proper, however, immigrants like the Glockners patronized smaller, less glamorous eateries where the crowds were exclusively German. Though scattered throughout the German wards, they were especially thick along the Bowery, the center of downtown nightlife, and on Avenue A, the Germans’ restaurant row.
More than the Irish or Russians or Italians, the Germans saw eating as a public activity, an occasion to leave the tenement and venture into the larger world. The typical immigrant restaurant displayed its offerings along the bar, which doubled as a buffet counter, the food arranged like a Flemish still life. A visitor to one such eating place, stunned by the copious display, described how the bar was
piled with joints and manufactured meats adapted to the strong German stomach;—enormous fat hams, not thoroughly boiled, for the German prefers his pig underdone: rounds of cold corned beef, jostled by cold roast legs and loins of veal; pyramids of sausages of every known size and shape, and several cognate articles of manufactured swine meat….
There were also baskets of freshly baked pretzels, mounds of Swiss and Limburger cheese, heaps of sliced onion, earthenware jars of caviar and a large glass jar of pickled oysters. The attached dining room, its walls painted with mountain scenery, was busy throughout the day and deep into the night, a feeding ground for German tradesmen, doctors, lawyers, and merchants, often accompanied by their wives and children. Both at home and in public, Germans preferred to dine as a family. 30
But public dining on a grand scale was connected with the many clubs and societies that formed the core of German social life in nineteenth-century New York. Known as Vereine , they were a carryover from the Old Country. The Vereine developed in Germany during the late 1700s, part of a new city-based culture in which merchants and trades people banded together in professional and political associations, representing their interests as the new German middle class. As German immigrants recreated the Vereine in New York, the clubs lost their political edge, or most of it, and became more purely social.
Just about every New York German belonged to at least one Verein , and some belonged to many of them, especially if they were reasonably well-off and could afford the membership fees. Any shared experience or common interest was reason to join a Verein . Some were organized around place of origin, while others were based on occupation, like the German grocers’ or brewers’ Vereine . Common-interest Vereine were for serious lovers of poetry or music or drama or athletics, though some were based on the flimsiest of excuses. In the 1880s, a group of German Jews living in Harlem established a Schnorrer’s (Yiddish for “moocher”) Verein , which hosted an annual clambake. Among the most prominent Vereine in Kleindeutschland were German singing societies like the Arion Club, which sang President Lincoln’s funeral hymn on the steps of City Hall as his body lay in state in the Grand Rotunda.
The Vereine met in saloons, beer
The Academy of Music closed in 1886, forced out of business by the newly built Metropolitan Opera House. In time, the rest of the theaters followed suit. Some closed permanently, others moved uptown to the more fashionable entertainment district around 42nd Street. Robbed of their customers, the saloons vanished too. Incredibly, Luchow’s managed to hang on until 1982, haunting 14th Street like a stranded visitor from another time.
The journey from Ermich’s lunch room to Pfaff’s to Luchow’s traced a rough semicircle that skirted the edges of Kleindeutschland . All three establishments played a major part in the transmission of German food ways to mainstream America. The frankfurters and hamburgers eaten in similar nineteenth-century German restaurants have become so thoroughly assimilated that we hardly recognize them as German at all. Within Kleindeutschland proper, however, immigrants like the Glockners patronized smaller, less glamorous eateries where the crowds were exclusively German. Though scattered throughout the German wards, they were especially thick along the Bowery, the center of downtown nightlife, and on Avenue A, the Germans’ restaurant row.
More than the Irish or Russians or Italians, the Germans saw eating as a public activity, an occasion to leave the tenement and venture into the larger world. The typical immigrant restaurant displayed its offerings along the bar, which doubled as a buffet counter, the food arranged like a Flemish still life. A visitor to one such eating place, stunned by the copious display, described how the bar was
piled with joints and manufactured meats adapted to the strong German stomach;—enormous fat hams, not thoroughly boiled, for the German prefers his pig underdone: rounds of cold corned beef, jostled by cold roast legs and loins of veal; pyramids of sausages of every known size and shape, and several cognate articles of manufactured swine meat….
There were also baskets of freshly baked pretzels, mounds of Swiss and Limburger cheese, heaps of sliced onion, earthenware jars of caviar and a large glass jar of pickled oysters. The attached dining room, its walls painted with mountain scenery, was busy throughout the day and deep into the night, a feeding ground for German tradesmen, doctors, lawyers, and merchants, often accompanied by their wives and children. Both at home and in public, Germans preferred to dine as a family. 30
But public dining on a grand scale was connected with the many clubs and societies that formed the core of German social life in nineteenth-century New York. Known as Vereine , they were a carryover from the Old Country. The Vereine developed in Germany during the late 1700s, part of a new city-based culture in which merchants and trades people banded together in professional and political associations, representing their interests as the new German middle class. As German immigrants recreated the Vereine in New York, the clubs lost their political edge, or most of it, and became more purely social.
Just about every New York German belonged to at least one Verein , and some belonged to many of them, especially if they were reasonably well-off and could afford the membership fees. Any shared experience or common interest was reason to join a Verein . Some were organized around place of origin, while others were based on occupation, like the German grocers’ or brewers’ Vereine . Common-interest Vereine were for serious lovers of poetry or music or drama or athletics, though some were based on the flimsiest of excuses. In the 1880s, a group of German Jews living in Harlem established a Schnorrer’s (Yiddish for “moocher”) Verein , which hosted an annual clambake. Among the most prominent Vereine in Kleindeutschland were German singing societies like the Arion Club, which sang President Lincoln’s funeral hymn on the steps of City Hall as his body lay in state in the Grand Rotunda.
The Vereine met in saloons, beer
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