Breaking Eggs in New York City: The Story of Grossingers Bakery and the Family That Built It

By Herbert Grosinger

In its heydey, Grossinger’s Bakery was the one stop shop for Upper West Siders seeking baked goods and traditional European treats. Breaking Eggs tells the story of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants during the depression in NYC and the business that grew into a legendary bakery. To this day, customers and grandchildren of those original customers still pine for the famous Praline ice cream cake created by the author’s father. This book takes you on a journey from recent immigrant to the final days of the bakery’s physical presence on the ever-changing Upper West Side. Step Inside to laugh and learn about running a business in a different time and to hear first person accounts of a bygone era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669806462

Herbert Grosinger

Herbert Grosinger grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan during the 40’s and 50’s and later took over his family’s business in that area. He went from stock broker to bakery owner and continued his family’s legacy.

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Copyright © 2022 by Herbert Grosinger.

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Rev. date: 01/11/2022

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 A Gypsy’s Curse and Complicated Name

Chapter 2 Tragedy, Love, and the Birth of Grossinger’s

Chapter 3 The People Behind the Pastries

Chapter 4 From Ex-Convict to Union Baker

Chapter 5 The Perfect Two-In-One

Chapter 6 Above The Bakery and Inside The Bakery

Chapter 7 Eugene Versus Ernest

Chapter 8 From Our Oven to Your Table

Chapter 9 Calling Us Home, the Upper Best Side

Chapter 10 Grandpa, Grandma AND Me

Chapter 11 Rebirth of a Bakery

Chapter 12 My Bar Mitzvah Soap Opera

Chapter 13 Gene Returns

Chapter 14 Fathers and Sons

Chapter 15 Losing my Father, Saving the Bakery

Chapter 16 Family Business vs. Family

PHOTO GALLERY

Chapter 17 This Could Be a Dangerous Business.

Chapter 18 It Permeated the Air. Our Customers Remember.

Chapter 19 Pastry Habits of the Rich and Famous

Chapter 20 Grossinger’s Goes Uptown

Chapter 21 Unleavened

Chapter 22 Goodbye to Mom: The End of an Age

Chapter 23 Unhinged: My Toughest Employee Ever

Chapter 24 The Parking Meter Vigilante

Chapter 25 The Upper West Side Goes Upscale

Chapter 26 Fighting for our Lives

Chapter 27 In Some Ways, History Gets Better

Chapter 28 Closing the Original Grossinger’s Home Bakery

Chapter 29 Gone! To the Highest Bidder

Chapter 30 Evolution

Chapter 31 Endings and New Beginnings

Chapter 32 A Different Point of View

Chapter 33 The Story and the Cakes Live On

To the memory of my wife, Myra.

Your artistic, vivacious, loving, and independent nature

buoyed me throughout the years.

INTRODUCTION

My parents, Ernest (Ernö, 1898–1972) and Isabella (1908–1983), had three kids: me, my brother, and the bakery. Eugene, born in 1932, was their first child. Grossinger’s Home Bakery, established in 1935, was their second. I came along in 1939. You could say I was their third child or second son, depending on how you want to look at it. Either way, this is the story of a family business with an emphasis on family. It begins in Europe, but mainly takes place in New York City’s Upper West Side, where over the years Grossinger’s had two Columbus Avenue locations—one at 76th Street and the other at 88th. From our founding in 1935 to our closing in 1999, we created pastries, babkas, cookies, Danish, doughnuts, rugelach, coffee cakes, birthday cakes, ice cream cakes, breads—and memories—for generations of New Yorkers.

For sixty-four years, our bakers chopped, diced, fried, frosted, kneaded, mixed, piped, proofed, sliced, stirred, whipped, and whisked hundreds of types of baked goods—all while zinging around a very small kitchen, twelve hours a day, in temperatures that often exceeded 100 degrees. On busy days, we easily tore through 30 dozen fresh eggs, 200 pounds of flour, 100 pounds of sugar and a 30-pound brick of unsalted butter. The tranquil front counter of our store belied the rough bursts of behind-the-scenes ordered disorder in the back—the constant soundtrack of clanking bowls, slamming trays, whirring mixers, and assorted shouts:

Move, hot stuff coming out.

Move, cakes going in.

"MOVE, gotta set it down!"

Got burned? Keep going. Got cut? Keep going. Of course, if there were a serious injury or other concern, everyone pitched in. We were family. Even so, professional baking is a science-meets-artistry-meets-deadlines kind of business. If you measure wrong, the recipe is ruined. If you work too slowly, too quickly, or carelessly, you’ll waste time, money, and ingredients. So do it fast. Do it right. Then do it again. And again…and again all while making it look elegant and effortless. We baked; therefore, we were.

Some of our customers lived in walk-up railroad flats and tenements, others in brownstones, still others in penthouses on Central Park West. Our fans included celebrities and high-end French chefs who put our cakes on their menus, and thousands of regular people who came through our doors year after year. We knew them, their children, and grandchildren—and they knew us.

Grossinger’s bakeries existed during a golden age of Manhattan, when thousands of small retailers dominated the city’s economy. Rents were affordable, which meant that immigrants and newcomers—families like mine—could start a business and achieve their dreams. Small shops and families helped build great cities and the bonds of neighborhoods.

Back then, we often had lines out the door. This was true not only for Grossinger’s but also for many other local bakeries. Now family-owned and operated bakeries that sell lovingly crafted old-world Jewish and Eastern European delicacies are disappearing. That’s why writing this book was so important to me. I want to celebrate bakery history and culture, and to remind people of a time, place, lifestyle, as well as recipes that may be fading, but deserve to be illuminated.

Breaking Eggs in New York City is not all sugar and spice. It also recounts both private and public losses, including a well-publicized battle to survive (or at least not go down without a fight) in the face of rent hikes and profits-first landlords who pushed out small retailers in favor of deep pocketed chain stores. Why did they do it? Because they could. This battle continues today in the face of continued development that displaces people and beloved businesses that are the heart and soul of New York City.

I sat on this book for years, stories swirling around in my head like cake batter in a mixer. Throughout that time, my friend Carmine, a retired English teacher, kept telling me, The clock is ticking; get going on that book. My kids, Liz and Ron, pushed me, too, saying, There’s no time like the present! Get that book done! When writer Tara Tandlich wrote about John Lennon for an online publication about the Upper West Side, she cited John’s love for Grossinger’s products and the perspective of our baker Roy Lutter so perfectly that I asked her if she’d help me shape this book. Luckily, she agreed.

In these pages, I recount many adventures—extraordinary, funny, difficult, and intense—from being lowered into an oven as a child to rescue a baking pan, to sharing an intimate conversation with long-time patron Dustin Hoffman, to mounting a high-speed French Connection style car chase in pursuit of my stolen bakery van, to getting into a street fight with a gang.

I also share my story of a reluctant career change. I was a stockbroker for many years and then returned, for many complex reasons, to be the manager of Grossinger’s and run the business. I offer my hard-won knowledge on the challenges of running a family business (that often ran me) and what I think is essential to getting it right. I hope my insights will be of help to any readers who are considering going into any type of venture with family or friends.

This book is very much for my parents, Ernest and Isabella, who built our business with their ingenuity, creativity, humanity, hard work, and strength. I want to reveal their dedication and perseverance. I hope this immigrant story will touch others and remind them of the efforts that many of their parents and grandparents may have made to build a life in this country.

This book is also for my brother Eugene, who is always with me, and our other family members and employees who kept Grossinger’s swept and scrubbed, and filled with baked goods—sweet and savory—and, of course, plenty of Praline Ice Cream Cakes.

Finally, this book is for all our customers. Long before anyone could Like someone on Facebook, post on Instagram, or group chat about kugel, our patrons voted with their feet and their wallets, then told their friends, who soon became customers, too.

Though the bakery is long closed, I still take orders and bake a few of our most beloved cakes, which I have packed in ice and shipped around the country. In my parents’ time, customers placed orders in person or by phone. Now they contact me via Grossinger’s website (www.grossingerscakes.com), or they find me via my Instagram page, or they text me on my cell, or friend me on Facebook. I can email back, or chat with them on Zoom. What would my parents have thought about all of this technology? Mom would probably have embraced it to reach more customers. Dad would have started following technology stocks. Regardless, I know they’d both be pleased that I’m still using Dad’s recipes today. Times change, but our Praline Ice Cream Cake remains the same.

Recently, I received an email from a woman who lived above Grossinger’s Home Bakery. She spoke of soothing and tempting aromas seeping into her windows. Inhaling and tasting our products link people to another time. Memories and smells linger. Today the physical bakeries are gone, yet the past resonates. Food becomes messenger and memory.

I hope you will enjoy taking this journey with me. Feel free to write me at the email address below and tell me what you think of the book. Or, of course, reach out to order a Praline Ice Cream Cake or one of our other specialties. I’d love to hear from you. Shalom!

—Herbert Grosinger

[e-mail]

www.grossingerscakes.com

CHAPTER ONE

A Gypsy’s Curse and

Complicated Name

The story of our bakery begins in 1914, with my fifteen-year-old Hungarian father, Ernest (Ernö), setting off on a long journey to the United States to reunite with his parents. It must have been a very strange experience for him. He hadn’t seen his parents in many years. I imagine he could barely remember them. That’s because a dozen years earlier, when he’d been little more than a baby, his father, Martin (Márton), had immigrated to the States. A few years later, in 1905, Ernest’s mom, Sadie, followed him. Martin and Sadie had two children: my father and his younger sister Rachel. For reasons I do not know or understand, Sadie took her youngest child, Rachel, with her and left my father, aged six, behind in the care of her parents. It was to be a temporary separation, but it lasted much longer than intended.

A year or two later, my grandfather Martin returned to collect his son, as well as some of his own siblings, to take them back to the States. Young Ernest hardly recognized his own father, as he hadn’t seen him in so many years. He was also afraid of him. It probably didn’t help that Martin threatened to toss my dad into a sack and drag him onto the boat. My father didn’t want to go, so he stayed behind with his grandparents, who raised him.

By the age of fifteen, my father’s grandparents had died, leaving him with no immediate family to live with. My father was still wary of going to America, but he had little choice. Plus, his twenty-six-year-old cousin, Tillie Zief, was going with her two very young children, and she made the case to him that he should come. Apparently she was very convincing. Tillie explained that if my father stayed behind, he’d not only have to join the army, as war was imminent, but he’d also be forced to eat traif, or non-kosher food. My dad was an Orthodox Jew and, therefore, kosher. To avoid eating non-kosher food, he listened to Tillie and agreed to get on the boat. My father traveled with Tillie and her two very young children, plus one other cousin, Sári Bleier, aged seventeen. They left their homes in Transylvania and headed for the seaport city of Fiume, Hungary, now Rijeka, Croatia. I should explain that though my family lived in Transylvania, which today is in Romania, we were Hungarians. At that time, these countries were all part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In New York, Dad’s mom, my grandma Sadie, had greatly missed her son. She had a job as a housekeeper, cook, and nanny for the wealthy Sprung family. The Sprungs were lawyers and garment manufacturers who had immigrated from Russia at the turn of the century. They loved Sadie and encouraged her to bring her son to this country now that his grandparents were gone. Sadie wired Ernest money and arranged for him to travel in comfort with Tillie and her young children in a good-sized, second-class cabin. He’d dine in a nicely furnished setting, with plentiful, carefully prepared meals. In comparison, Sari would travel in steerage, the cramped, windowless lower deck. She’d sleep in a small, crowded room with other women, and be served plain, skimpy food. Sari was thrilled nonetheless to be going to America.

My father and his cousins boarded the RMS Caronia, bound for New York. Before the boat left port, a pivotal incident occurred. My dad ran across the deck after his two younger cousins. During the chase, he headed toward a gypsy woman selling eggs. He tried to jump over her basket of eggs but ended up jumping into the basket and accidentally breaking all of the eggs. This woman was one of many villagers and townspeople selling items to those about to set sail. She cursed him in Hungarian, their shared native tongue, "Eltöröd a tojásokat! Mindig eltöröd a tojásokat. A gyerekeid összetörik a tojásokat. Which means: You break eggs! You will always break eggs. Your children will break eggs."

Fast forward several years, during which time my father studied with some of the finest European pastry chefs in New York City. Eventually, he opened his own bakery, with the help of his parents, wife, and sons. Later, I took over. Not only did the gypsy’s curse come true, it also turned out to be a blessing.

Grousinger vs. Grosinger vs. Grossinger

For many people, Grossinger’s brings to mind the famous hotel resort in the Catskill Mountains, where a large number of show business talents first got their start. The owners, Jenny and Harry Grossinger, were possibly cousins with the same last name. Although they could be my distant cousins, the spelling of our last names differ.

My immediate family and I have spent our entire lives answering questions about the various spellings of our last name. To clarify: Grossinger has three different spellings: Grousinger, Grossinger, and Grosinger. My parents were cousins, which meant they were born with the same name: Grossinger. Here’s where the spelling changed. When my grandfather Martin, came to this country in 1902, the immigration authorities on Ellis Island asked him his name, which he stated with his Hungarian-Yiddish accent. They wrote the name as it sounded to their ears: Grousinger. This became official. When my father came to New York in 1914, he adopted Grousinger, to have the same name as his father. However, when my brother and I were born, my parents argued over the spelling. Dad insisted on Grousinger. Mom wanted the correct spelling: Grossinger. A compromise was reached: My brother and I were given one s and called Grosinger, which is the spelling on our birth certificates. However, when my parents established the bakery in 1935, they used the double s and named it Grossinger’s. Not only were customers confused as to