Content area
Full Text
As piquant as the pickles on Essex Street are Dr. Gerard Wolfe's guided walking tours of the Lower East Side. They won't begin again until the spring. But if you've done a quick read of these travel reports and a more thorough one of Wolfe's books on the subject (they've just been reissued in paperback), you'll have no trouble getting around or in discovering your own variations on his basic route.
What you will miss are the buba misahs he comes up with at every stop along the course. He had a good one for us when our group paused to admire the imposing site of Yarmolowsky's Bank at the southwest corner of Canal and Orchard Streets. In its day (the bank was founded in 1873), the building was the tallest on the Lower East Side -- 11 stories high and topped by a water tower sheathed in what looks like a small Greek temple from the street.
Until the depression of 1913, private financial institutions like Yarmolowsky's and Max Kobre's around the corner were the main souces of loans for the hard-pressed immigrants. The well-established commercial banks could afford to screen potential clients more carefully and took no chances, as did Yarmolowsky and Kobre, on handing out money without collateral. When the hard times of 1913 hit. Yarmolowsky and Kobre went bankrupt, and the savings of thousands of small investors were lost.
Wolfe tells of the very old woman he would see regularly on his tours. As she passed the Yarmolowsky building -- long since boarded up -- she would spit on the sidewalk and mutter, "Er soll ge'harget veren!" ("He should drop dead!).
But, madam," Wolfe would reply in the courtly Yiddish of a tenured professor of history at New York University, "Yarmolowsky, may his soul rest in peace, passed on almost 70 years ago."
"Then he should drop dead all over again!" was the unrelenting reply.
ALAS, POOR Yarmolowsky. Until his bank failed, he had been able to rent out all the upper floors of his skyscraper to sweatshops, except for the premises of the H.S. Perlman Co., now defunct, one of the two Jewish-owned piano manufacturers in the United States....