This article, from The New York Times of December 1, 2002, will be of interest to those doing New York City research.

----Christopher Gray


STREETSCAPES
Reader's Question Researching the Past of a Lower East Side Tenement
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Query: We are home schooling our daughters and for our social studies unit this fall have decided to try to find out what we can about our building, 237-9 Eldridge Street, on the Lower East Side. About five years ago we were doing some renovations and found in the walls a pamphlet for the Max Kobre Russian Bank, offering services like rail and ship ticketing, and some envelopes inscribed in pencil "Shapiro" and "Isat Shapiro." Would you have any other suggestions for us, or advice on where we might begin? . . . Rachel Andreyev, Manhattan.

Answer:    For many buildings in Manhattan built in 1866 or later (1868 in Brooklyn, 1874 in the Bronx, 1898 in Queens and Staten Island) a researcher can use the Department of Buildings' fax-back buildings information system to zero in on the construction date. Dial the department's main number — (212) 227-7000 — and press 2 and then 3 to get to the information system and then the property profile overview.

Farther down the telephone chain is the computerized Actions and Violations report for this building, which contains the numbers of older building and alteration permits. (The process is quicker with the block and lot number, but the address is sufficient, and if a fax machine is not available, a visit is possible to the Manhattan office, at 280 Broadway, at Chambers Street, Mondays to Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Tuesdays from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.)
In your case the Actions & Violations report yields the number for the new building application — NB148/1903, meaning the 148th plan filed for a new structure in 1903 in Manhattan. The article "Researching a New York City Building," posted on the Web at www.nysoclib.org, gives a general rundown on this procedure.

To see the details of the new-building application, it is easiest to examine the microfilmed copies of the department's docket books (yearly application summaries) at the Municipal Archives, at 31 Chambers Street, Room 103, Mondays-Thursdays 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Fridays 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The entry gives the basic data of the building, a six-story, 50-foot-front tenement erected in 1903, at a construction cost of $45,000. The developer was Leonor Spielberger of 76 St. Mark's Place, and the architects were Sass & Smallheiser, who did many tenement designs.

Land maps and other records show that Spielberger's single tenement replaced a pair of five-story buildings, each 25 feet wide. Listings from the digitized 1890 New York City directory at www.Ancestry.com indicate that they also were tenements, with 8 to 10 families apiece, whose occupants included Joseph Zwonk, a cigarmaker, and Robert Weir, a boatman.

Because these earlier land maps show the older buildings without any light wells on either side, they were probably built before the 1879 law that required lozenge-shaped air shafts on either side. Post-1879 structures, because of their narrower central areas, are often called dumbbell tenements.
In 1901, a new tenement law was passed with stricter light-court requirements. This legislation made it much less economic to build the old 25-foot-front tenements, like the one now occupied by the Tenement House Museum, at 97 Orchard Street, and spurred wider 50-foot-front tenements, like yours.

Although the nomenclature has become muddied, buildings erected before the 1901 law are generally called old-law tenements, and those built afterward, like yours, are called new-law tenements. "A History of Housing in New York City," by Richard Plunz (Columbia University Press, 1990), contains an excellent section on tenement planning and legislation.

No post-1890 New York City directories have been digitized, and census returns are not fully searchable yet online. To determine occupancy of 237-239 Eldridge you will have to check census returns in person. Most people use the local-history section of the New York Public Library at the main branch, at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue (Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m.-7:30 p.m., Thursdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.) or the National Archives regional office, at 201 Varick Street, near Canal Street (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8 a.m.- 8 p.m.).

Perhaps the "Isat Shapiro" of your envelope is captured by the 1910 census as Isaac Shapiro, 35, who had been in the United States for nine years but still spoke only Yiddish. Like most of the building's residents, his birthplace was listed as "Russ.-Yiddish." A carpenter, he had been out of work for 40 weeks in 1909 and lived at No. 237-239 with his wife, Frada, daughters Minnie, 7, and Pauline, 2, and son, Isidor, 3. Isaac had come over in 1904, followed by his wife and eldest daughter in 1906; Isidor and Pauline were born in the United States.

The census records are rich documents of humanity, practically short stories in the way they capture fragmentary glimpses of some people, like Isie "last name unknown," a 20-year-old boarder in the apartment of Max Goldstein. Isie was a peddler, described as "house to house." Looking at the occupations column of the census evokes a lost age: ice dealer; ladies' shirtwaists; seltzer business; brancher, artificial flowers; barrel dealer; hat pins. The latter was the given occupation of Fannie Ackerman, 15, who had arrived in the United States in 1904.

Your children can search records of adjacent buildings to see if there were racial or ethnic distinctions among building tenants, and can search forward and backward to see how a street's population changed over time, up through the latest census open to the public, that of 1930.

The ProQuest database of the digitized New York Times, available at many libraries, yields a number of citations for "237 Eldridge," including an October 1930 article about the closing of an illegal liquor operation in the building and a 1956 article about the arrest of a teenager who lived there and was planning an attack on another boy. It also picks up a 1904 article about Spielberger, the building's developer. He was a hotelkeeper in Rockaway Beach and began building operations in Manhattan in 1901; he declared bankruptcy in 1904.

Max Kobre of the Max Kobre Bank also had financial difficulties. In 1914 his three bank branches — one on the Lower East Side and two in Brooklyn — were shut down by the State Banking Department. Kobre was indicted on charges of banking fraud along with a partner, Moses Ginsberg. (Ginsberg was later vindicated, according to his 1959 obituary in The Times, and was designated a federal court trustee for the bank's liquidation. He entered the real estate business and in 1930 built the Carlyle Hotel, at 76th Street and Madison Avenue.)

There were near riots in 1914 at the Kobre bank at Canal Street and Broadway, although the depositors there ultimately got back 55 cents on the dollar.
In 1916, on the day before Kobre's trial, his body was found under the open jet of a gas stove in his gas-filled kitchen at 115 West 122nd Street. But the coroner said that Kobre had suffered from heart disease, and the verdict was that death was from natural causes, so his estate got the proceeds of his $600,000 life insurance policy, which was divided among the depositors.

Was Mr. Shapiro one of them? Perhaps not. By that time he was living in Harlem.