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The Streit's Matzo company is leaving the Lower East Side location where it opened in 1925 and since occupied as a mainstay of a neighborhood of tenements and a sizable Jewish population. One can still walk down Rivington St. and peer through levered windows to see rotating metal racks where the company produces its unleavened bread. Aron Streit founded the matzoh company in 1914, revived it in 1923, and moved it into a red brick building on Rivington St. in Manhattan in 1925.
His sons Irving and Jack took over the company in 1937 after the death of their father, with the older brother Irving becoming the president, but the two brothers sharing responsibilities for operations equally. Irving Streit died in 1982 and was followed six years later with the death of Jack Streit almost ten years ago in 1998. The New York Times obituary of Jack Streit is prescient in predicting the exit from the neighborhood, even as the Lower East Side was just on the cusp of a wave of gentrification that would send property values soaring.
By rights, the Streit factory on Rivington Street should have been shuttered long ago, the ovens sold for scrap, the small family-owned business gobbled up by some giant conglomerate and Mr. Streit freed from his 60-year routine to play golf, perhaps, or to travel the world or merely to laze around his house in the Manhattan Beach section of Brooklyn.The Daily News reports that the Rivington St. property has been quietly on the market for the last few years, but it's now become public that the family is looking to sell its prime real estate for $25 million. Company officials are saying that it intends to open another matzoh facility elsewhere in New York in the future.
Photo via LeoLondon's Flickr.
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This is awesome news as we need more condos for hipsters with trust funds, lawyers, and hedge fund managers in that neighborhood, ASAP.
So vere do I go now to buy from fresh matzos and my Chanukah hams, Balducci's?
that place is so cool. i walked by there right before passover earlier this year and they were cranking out as much matzo as humanly possible. i love it that you can just peer through the windows and watch all the workers and conveyor belts. it's a total trip, especially in that neighborhood.
occasionally they dump a massive pile of remnant matzo on the street. it's pretty funny.
"Matzoh by Streit's - for the unleavened experience of a lifetime." - Joe Franklin (as played by Billy Crystal on SNL.
Streit's my friends ... matzoh by Streit's ...
Plus we're sponsored by beverages from Hoffman ... and by Martin Paints ... it ain't just paint!
We stopped to watch matzos coming out of the oven when one of the workers broke two slabs and handed them to us, only in New York, free, hot matzo, delicious.
I saw the same thing happen when following two middle-aged gentlemen one night, who paused in front of the bakery. One of them exclaimed "Wait a second! This is Streit's! Do you know how long I've been eating Streit's Matzo? My entire life!"
The next thing you know, hot fresh matzo bread was being passed through the window to the astonished passersby by one of the workers. I love this city.
Nothing better than hot matzo by Streit's on a blustery winter day. They remind me of that great Christmas song by Johnnie Mathisstein, "Matzo's roasting on an open grill, gefilte fish nipping on a hook."
A little Mogan David wine with a spritz of beverages by Hoffman and the yuletide spirit is up and running.