Content area
Full Text
In 1925, an ambitious New York Jewish builder, Irwin Chanin, decided to visit Paris. Born in Brooklyn, Chanin had spent his youth in Poltava, Ukraine, before returning with his parents to settle in Bensonhurst.2 After graduating with an engineering degree in 1915 from Cooper Union, the city’s free architectural and engineering school, Chanin worked for several years on the New York and Philadelphia subways. When the United States declared war in 1917, he entered military service. During the war, Chanin helped construct poison gas facilities in Cleveland. Back in New York as a civilian, he built his first two single-family houses in Bensonhurst, scraping together capital for the project. This experience proved financially successful, so Chanin brought his younger brother, Henry, into his budding construction business in 1919 to handle the finances.3 Soon Chanin was not only building single and two-family houses in Brooklyn, but also buying larger properties to flip, such as 26 Court Street, the old Garfield Hotel in downtown Brooklyn. In this case, he sold the building to a group of three other Brooklyn Jewish builders-Abraham Bricken, Isidor Friedman, and Leo Schloss-who announced plans to construct a 26-story office building on the site, the largest office building at that time in Brooklyn.4
Chanin’s timing was propitious. The end of World War I released a flood of construction in New York City-residential, commercial, and industrial. During the 1920s, New York City, housing a small fraction of the American population, accounted for twenty percent of new residential units in the United States. Encouraged by ten-year tax abatements, builders covered vast tracts of land in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens with a mix of one, two, and multi-family houses. At the same time, substantial sections of Manhattan, such as the Upper West and East Sides, along with Washington Heights, attracted builders eager to erect both upper-class and middle-class apartment buildings in place of single-family brownstones and private luxury houses. Jewish builders, who entered the city’s real estate and construction industry in the nineteenth century, often building and remodeling tenements for the enormous influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, expanded their activities even as newcomers like Chanin joined their ranks.5 Jeffrey Gurock’s masterful history of Jews in Harlem, for example, uncovered...