Across the street was a Bar called Foxe’s Corner and it was a hangout for those connected guys. There were two other Auster brothers, one of them was a shady character who was involved in a murder. Louis Auster’s son, Mendy Auster, worked the counter and made the egg cream mixture in the basement when it was needed. The local bookmakers found this place much to their liking. I knew little about what was going on inside the back room of Austers except it was out of bounds to me. In the back of the store, there was a room with tables for sitting down and hanging out. Halfway down the store, a group of telephone booths were on the left and right sides. There was a black and white marble-topped counter with stools located on the left side of the store. The front counter opened on to 2nd Avenue for walk up service where gum, cigarettes, pretzels, etc. The Auster store was a corner location with two entrance doors, one on 2nd Avenue and another on the side of 7th Street. Yiddish theater was thriving and just a little bit uptown was where Carrol Burnett had her 1972 hit show Once Upon a Mattress, in the off-Broadway Phoenix Theatre before moving to Broadway. This block was also the site of the Yiddish Second Avenue Village Theater which later became the Fillmore East Auditorium. The Harmatz family owned the corner building where Auster rented his store. Louis Auster rented his store on the corner of 7th street and 2nd avenue in New York, from my grandfather, Harry Harmatz, the founder and owner of Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant. Lionel shares his memories of the famous New York Egg Cream in the 1950s: Personal remembrances of Lionel Levy, grandson of Harry Harmatz who was the founder of Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant in Brooklyn New York. It is reported that 3,000 Egg Creams a day were sold until the day the store closed. After tasting a similar drink called “chocolate et creme” in Paris, France, he asked to have one made in New York.ġ900s – According to most historians, the Egg Cream was allegedly created in the early 1900s by a Jewish candy shop owner, Louis Auster, who came to America and opened a candy store in Brooklyn, New York. Today, Egg Cream drinks are being bottled by a few small companies.Įgg creams became so popular that author, Elliot Willensky, wrote in his book titled When Brooklyn Was the World: 1920-1957, “a candy store minus an egg cream, in Brooklyn at least, was as difficult to conceive of as the Earth without gravity.”ġ880s – One version or legend says that it began in 1880s on the Lower East Side of New York with the teenage Yiddish theatre star, Boris Thomashevsky (1868-1939), who brought the first Yiddish play to New York from London and was also a founding member and pioneer of the Yiddish theater in America. The cream, chocolate, and soda had a tendency to separate and to go bad after a couple days at best, and efforts to pasteurize or preserve the product ruined the taste. For many years, the egg cream remained a product sold only through New York soda fountains because bottled versions were impossible to make.
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