Before Yonah Schimmel moved into an actual brick and mortar store on East Houston Street, he sold his knishes, reportedly made by his wife, from a pushcart.
“When Schimmel, a rabbi, left his native Romania for New York late in the 19th century, he had visions of becoming a teacher,” wrote Bill Morris in the New York Daily News in 2004.
But instead of joining the ranks of educators, Schimmel became part of the vast brigade of the city’s peddlers and vendors. He then opened a knish shop on East Houston with his cousin, states Sam Roberts in a 2010 New York Times article. The knishery relocated to its current site in 1910.
Schimmel left the knish business early on, wrote Roberts. He likely missed what was dubbed in 1916 the “knish war,” which involved a knish baker on nearby Rivington Street slashing his knish price from five to three cents, among other tactics, to undercut a rival knishery across the street.
Who knew the knish business was so cutthroat?
Now there are no rival knish bakeries; Yonah Schimmel’s is the only one left on the Lower East Side. (Yonah Schimmel has even outlasted Mrs. Stahl’s knishes in Brighton Beach, which closed in 2005.)
Schimmel’s namesake knishery continues to turn out doughy pillows of potato and kasha that go from the oven to an ancient display case. The store signage remains charmingly frozen in time.
Images of the shop reveal how little has changed, despite the transformation of so much of East Houston Street—once a Jewish immigrant main drag that became a trendy nightlife destination in the 1990s and early 2000s.
In the second photo, from about 1940, there’s a vertical knish sign—how wonderful if it managed to survive and is in storage somewhere! But otherwise, the little shop’s windows and doorway, save for a ramp, appear the same.
Thirty-three years later, Hedy Pagremanski painted a robust view of Yonah Schimmel’s (third image) looking eerily as it does today.
Pagremanski depicts the current signage above the store (with it’s curious misspelling of Schimmel), a crowd of neighborhood folks, and signs of life in some of the tenement windows, like flower boxes and curtains. Instead of another tenement on the right, there’s just an empty lot—hardly an uncommon sight on the Lower East Side of the 1970s.
The last image shows the current Yonah Schimmel’s. Flanked by a featureless hotel on the right and a reflective glass box on the left (RIP Sunshine Cinema), the knishery comes off as a relic of a very different Manhattan. Which it is—and the city is better for it.
[Second image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; third image: MCNY, 79.50]
Tags: East Houston Street Early 1900s, Hedy Pagremanski Yonah Schimmel, Knishes New York City, Yonah Schimmel East Houston Street, Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery 137 East Houston Street, Yonah Schimmel Knishes
March 4, 2024 at 6:25 am |
Really good segment. However doughy pillows has never been attached to a knish which are not doughy nor pillows.
March 4, 2024 at 10:01 pm |
I concede because most knishes these days are like fried rocks. But I grew up on fresh-baked Mrs. Stahl’s knishes, and I remember those luscious kasha and potato concoctions as soft and doughy. They looked like bricks, but they had some kind of soft dough marbling inside them. If only someone had the recipe and would recreate them!
March 4, 2024 at 10:57 am |
One of my favorite treats! Nothing better than a Yonah Schimmel knish for dinner.
And I always figured that the Schimmel/Shimmel dichotomy on the sign was the result of long-ago instructions or notes in Yiddish, written in Hebrew script.
March 4, 2024 at 11:02 am |
Perhaps you remember the Purple Man and the Purple Woman from the early 70s who built the sadly long-gone garden from rubble on Stanton Street. I ran into him outside Yonah’s a few years ago: herewith an essay I then penned about him amd the knishery: https://newyorkwanderer.com/when-you-learn-how-to-do-it-please-let-me-know/
March 4, 2024 at 12:22 pm |
Loved reading your essay on the Purple man outside Schimmel’s.
March 4, 2024 at 12:31 pm
Many thanks, kind Sir. Many more of my NY essays on the same website of mine http://www.newyorkwanderer.com
March 4, 2024 at 1:20 pm |
Thanks for the link to your essay, Ben!
March 4, 2024 at 3:04 pm |
I clicked through to these blogs and did not find any way to subscribe,. Is there a specific link for wordpress please?
March 4, 2024 at 11:20 am |
It seems to me th
March 5, 2024 at 12:34 pm |
My father was a Yonah Schimmel’s devotee dating back to the 1930s. I remember going there in the early 1950s, when our family lived in Forest Hills. Even after we moved to Merrick in the mid-50s, he would bring us knishes by stopping there after leaving his Manhattan office. I make it a point to continue that tradition.
March 7, 2024 at 11:33 am |
Thanks for reminding me that I should venture a few blocks south for a knish or two! All the delis and dairy restaurants and Jewish bakeries are gone (save Russ & Daughters). The neighborhood hardly feels like one any more. Tourist hotels and pricey ‘food boutiques’ hardly help. Veselka is the only remnant of the Ukrainian restaurants that were also plentiful in the past. You do a service to younger folks to highlight a glorious, if not affluent past.
March 9, 2024 at 1:00 pm |
The Hedy painting would make a beautiful puzzle!
March 17, 2024 at 8:23 pm |
Does anyone recall the building next to it that contained a pet shop
which came crashing down when a car traveling down 2nd ave crashed into the building and tore half of it down. It must have been the late sixties or very early 70’s .
I remember as a child driving by with my father and seeing the apartments with beds and furniture in full view. Pets were also scattered in the debris from the Pet store .