Garden Cafeteria (former, now Wing Shoon Restaurant)

By Emma Jacobs

Partly by accident, and partly on the strength of an excellent Jewish menu, the Garden Dairy Cafeteria found itself at the center of Jewish intellectual life on the Lower East Side.

The corner of Rutgers and Broadway was once at the heart of a thriving community of Jewish immigrants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Back when the Yiddish papers still printed daily, and their Yiddish-speaking audience still filled the Lower East Side, the Garden Cafeteria served as a meeting-place for a crowd of Jewish intellectuals, along with the lively neighborhood crowd.

According to a biographical sketch of Charles Metzger published in 1967, Metzger opened the Garden Cafeteria in June of 1941. Originally from Austria, Metzger was born in 1897, and immigrated to the United States in 1911. Initially, he served up meals to customers in Harlem before he moved his operations south to the Lower East Side. “He’s a symbol of a plain guy,” Gabriele Werfeli, a Swiss editor from Warsaw, said of the owner. “Former waiter made a place that everybody could come in. A literary man could come in, a writer, or a longshoreman could come in, as long as he’s a mensch.” The Cafeteria was open 24 hours a day to cater to the schedules of Americans during the war years and Metzger found himself with an immediate success. Eventually, the management broke through one of the walls of the building to add more space. The restaurant employed one waiter and one waitress who served the diners their meals.

The cafeteria was strictly dairy in keeping with Jewish dietary laws. It was self service. Customers came in and took a ticket as they entered from the man who sat on a high stool by the revolving door. The man behind the counter punched the ticket with the price of each dish the patron ordered so that the customers, who often lingered for hours, could pay for everything they had ordered at once when they finally departed. “They’d have a cup of coffee,” recalls one of Metzger’s employees, Bert Feinberg, “and they’d sit and they’d sit and they’d talk. Around about eleven-o-clock the lunch hour would start to start and they’d come in. And you needed the table and they wouldn’t get up. So I would go around with a wet rag and wipe the tables down so it was wet so they couldn’t lean down on anything, and literally push them out, because the lunch was so fabulous here we needed a table. And then as soon as the lunch was over, they were back.” The cafeteria was filled from early morning until past midnight.

Patrons clustered around the cafeteria’s communal tables under the mural of peddlers and vendors on nearby Orchard Street. The cafeteria was stocked with all the traditional Jewish favorites along with American standards. As Feinberg recites, “On the salad counter you had a fresh fruit salad and cottage cheese, maybe a dollop of sour cream, egg plant, chopped egg, chopped tuna, fried herring, matjes herring, fried filet, cold fluke and fried fluke. Then on the hot–all the vegetables, all the kosher vegetables. And fish. You had white fish and salmon, halibut, and then there were two soups a day and there was the same soups every Monday, every Tuesday, every Wednesday, so people came in and they knew what they wanted…and we had a display case with our desserts, jello, bread pudding, fruit pudding, chocolate pudding, fresh fruit, salad.”

The biggest time of the year was the Jewish holiday of Passover, when the Cafeteria closed for the first two days of the holiday and reopened with an entirely new stock of dishware. The Garden stocked Streit’s matsa in boxes in the window and offered holiday meals on the clean dishes, Feinberg recalls, serving easily a thousand matsa brei for breakfast.

The stretch of Broadway that housed the Garden was known as “Yiddish newspaper row.” The offices of all the Yiddish papers lined the street: the Orthodox Yiddisher Tageblatt (Yiddish Daily Paper), Wahrheit (Truth), Der Tag (The Day), Morgen Zhurnal (Morning Journal), a humorous weekly Der Groisser Kundess (The Big Stick) and first and foremost among them, The Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), now called The Forward. The Forverts,founded in 1897, and which had, at one time, a circulation larger than the New York Times, was one of the leading American-Jewish publications, reporting with a socialist bent. The Forward would eventually be published in Yiddish and English, but the exclusively Yiddish-language paper was run from the majestic Forward Building (constructed in 1911-12) just north of the Garden until 1974. In its first few decades, the Forward building became a gathering place, a “nerve center” of Jewish labor, which would see spontaneous demonstrations form out front and crowds gather for election results. Some of the greatest of a generation of American Jewish writers also wrote for The Forward during its years on the Lower East Side. The Forward building also once housed the headquarters of the Workmen’s Circle, a Yiddish cultural organization that has since moved to East 33rd street (and still shares a building with The Forward), and the Folksbitle, a successful Yiddish theatre which also survives uptown. Also located nearby on East Broadway, the Educational Alliance settlement house offered the immigrants education and lectures. The neighborhood, and the tenements and labor-built co-ops that housed a great number of the neighborhood’s Jews were crowded, and so people came out to the Garden to get out of their rooms.

The building that housed the Garden had a prior history as a Jewish meeting place. In the 1870s, building records for 165 E. Broadway report the existence of lodge rooms on site. Abraham Cahan, head of The Forward, recalls in his memoir that 165 East Broadway was full of halls and meeting rooms. Melech Epstein reported in his 1969 history of the Jewish labor movement that the building was a popular meeting place during this era. Cahan and his associates split from the Russian Workers Union to found the Russian Labor Lyceum in the 1880s, which met every Sunday afternoon in “Bed Star Hall,” for speeches and debate. Cahan appeared at the hall in 165 E. Broadway in other capacities as well. He addressed a “small meeting of ‘Russian and Polish Jewish’ tailors called to discuss the formation of a union” in 1884. In the corner of the room on the building’s top floor, Cahan observed, an ark still stood in testimony to the room’s use that day as a synagogue for Yom Kippur services. “After my speech,” he recalled, “we enrolled the first members of our new union in front of the lectern.” The Labor Lyceum folded by 1885, under the weight of too much discussion and hair-splitting argumentation. Weddings took place in the American Star Hall and it was there that the first annual entertainment and ball of the New York County Medico-Pharmaceutical League was reportedly held in 1900. The Jewish National Fund Bureau for America would establish an office in the building by 1911. 1n 1919, Fisher’s Dairy Lunch took over at 165 E. Broadway, opening a restaurant and offices. In 1939, a restaurant simply called “Ray” was listed there, and in 1941, the owners of an eatery called SGS Dairy Cafeteria sought permission to mount a sign.

Many historians and journalists place the Garden much earlier, citing the Garden as a regular hangout of Leon Trotsky and Emma Goldman, though Metzger’s Garden would not have been open early enough to host them. Possible explanations include the conflation of the Garden with another of the eating places that existed on the site. Visits by the famous revolutionaries would have made a good story, and especially as the numbers of the East Side cafes dwindled, the Garden could have attained more significance in East Siders’ memories–one visit becoming a regular habit and the place itself coming to signify a disappearing cafe culture. A visit to the building would not have been impossible. Trotsky at least, did grant The Forward an interview upon his arrival in New York in January of 1917, when it would have already been located down the street from 165 E. Broadway. Trotsky wrote four articles for the paper before he stormed out over a political dispute with Cahan over The Forward’s declaration of support once the US had entered World War I. Trotsky was living in the Bronx, however, so the area around The Forward was unlikely to have been a regular haunt. He would return to Russia three months after his arrival, on March 27, 1917, to join the revolution. Emma Goldman, the famous labor organizer, spent years on the Lower East Side before she was deported in 1919. Only Fidel Castro, another reputed visitor to the Garden, could possibly have spent time in New York late enough to frequent the cafeteria as such, but no record of a visit exists.

Located within the cluster of Jewish cultural and business institutions on East Broadway, the cafeteria became a meeting place. The businessmen from Orchard Street, the center of Jewish commerce in the area, would come in for meals. The after-theatre crowd would arrive from the Yiddish theatre company next door in the evenings after the shows, mingling with the actors themselves. When one leading lady (who was known affectionately by the Yiddish name for redhead) would enter, the patrons would stand and applaud. The writers for The Forward gathered to discuss and argue. The writers would drop in on their way to and from the building to drop off their articles. They sat by the big front window so their colleagues would see them from the street and stop in, before they moved to a regular table in the 240-seat dining room that was created in the back. The printers and typographers, in the paper union hats they used to make for themselves formed their own circle at another table. The employees of the Workmen’s Circle arrived for meals as well, and sometimes officials from City Hall; in the 1960s, Mayor Lindsay would stop in for his power breakfasts. Young people met to chat and an older generation to talk for hours on end.

As Yiddish scholar Aaron Lansky recalled from his visit to the Garden in the 1980s: “As we squeezed ourselves into five empty seats at one of the cafeteria’s long communal tables, the people already sitting there didn’t even look up: They were far too busy arguing, engaged in a passionate discussion of some heated subject beyond our linguistic reach, which is to say that they were all speaking in Yiddish and all speaking at once. Hands were waving, fingers pointing, sentences punctuated with heaping spoonfuls of sour cream.”

Metzger became deeply involved with Jewish cultural life in New York City. He married Beatrice Kaplan, with whom he had three children, Ruth, Jeanne, and Bernard. His son, Bernard did not enjoy working at the Garden, or working under his father, so he refused to enter the business. Instead, Charles Metzger recruited his son-in-law to help him run the Garden. Bert Feinberg, the husband of Jeanne, helped his father-in-law manage the cafeteria for twenty-five years. Feinberg was a recently-returned veteran of WWII, who had been present at the liberation of Dachau, and stayed after the war in Munich, employed by the army as a civilian. Soon after he returned and met and married Jeanne Metzger, his father-in-law offered him a job working in the cafeteria in 1949. After about a year, Feinberg says, “I thoroughly ingested the business and I took on the responsibility. I started to manage it and he started to take more time off.”

Metzger, it was reported, ran “a strictly union shop.” Besides Feinberg, there was a chef and the cook, a Romanian ex-baroness. Ada Hirsch was recalled by patrons as the tango-dancing cashier immortalized in the photographs Bruce Davidson took at the cafeteria in the 1970s. Louis Green joined the Cafeteria after his own successful Broadway cafeteria that he had run with his brother was bought out; in 1963 the Metzgers would sponsor a death notice in memory of their “beloved manager.”

Feinberg remembers the Cafeteria as a wonderful place to work. “It was a great time,” he repeats. And, he remembers, “It was fascinating for me coming from my background, because it was political, it was Zionist, it was anti-Zionist. It was very intellectual.”

Some of the writers and poets who wrote for the The Forward and frequented the Garden were very well-known, such as Elie Wiesel, and especially, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Bashevis Singer, one of the leading Jewish writers of his generation, was famously fond of the Garden Cafeteria’s rice pudding. The East Broadway cafeteria was a regular haunt of his when he came down to deliver his stories to The Forward and he memorialized the cafeteria in a short story: “The Cabalist of East Broadway.”

“For a number of years while I worked as a journalist,” Bashevis Singer wrote, “the Garden Cafeteria was my second home. I ate there and discussed literature with my literary chums, gossiped about publishers, editors and especially about the critics who didn’t like us and whom we disliked. We also questioned the very purpose of literature. What can it do? What has it done in the past? What can one expect it to do in the future? To strengthen our arguments we ate mountains of rice pudding and drank countless cups of coffee. Of course I observed the types and characters who visited the cafeteria. Although they were all poor and wore shabby clothes, they were rich in individuality. Every one of them complained about the misery of life in New York in his own style. They were unique in every possible way.”

The cafeteria saw its own dramas play out. Although Charles Metzger owned several businesses, including the bakery making the cafeteria’s bread, he was close to illiterate in English, reading nothing beyond the sports page, Feinberg remembers. Taking advantage of his boss’ weakness, Metzger’s accountant Lawrence Block began handing him checks to be signed during the busiest moments at the cafeteria; checks that turned out ultimately to be made out to himself. The fraud began in April of 1958 and took years to be discovered, during which time Metzger did something he hated, he raised prices, because, as Feinberg recalls, he “found he wasn’t making any money.” Even the New York Times noted the price hike in 1963. Blintzes had gone up a nickel, the Times reported, and customers were being charged “an extra dime for salads and up to 15 cents more for fish dishes.” The theft was finally discovered while Metzger’s accountant was vacationing in Florida.

The cafeteria was already struggling against stronger forces, however, by mid-century. In the fifties, Feinberg recalls, the night shifts of the war years had ended and television was competing for people’s attention in the evenings. Also, demographically, the neighborhood was starting to change, as the Jewish population began moving out to the suburbs in greater numbers. Feinberg recalls the bohemians arriving, including the artists Jackson Pollack and Malcolm Morley, who lived in the neighborhood. They never had any money, Feinberg remembers, and he became friends with Morley and would give him soup. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in the “Cabalist of East Broadway” in 1973: “As happens so often in New York, the neighborhood changed. The synagogues became churches, the yeshivas restaurants or garages. Here and there one could still see a Jewish old people’s home, a shop selling Hebrew books, a meeting place for landsleit from some village in Rumania or Hungary. I had to come downtown a few times a week, because the Yiddish newspaper to which I contributed was still there. In the cafeteria on the corner, in former times one could meet yiddish writers, journalists, teachers, fund raisers for Israel and the like. Blintzes, borscht, kreplech, chopped liver, rice pudding, and egg cookies were the standard dishes. Now the place catered mainly to Negroes and Puerto Ricans. The voices were different, the smells were different. Still, I used to go there occasionally to eat a quick lunch or to drink a cup of coffee.”

The upstairs tenants at 165 Broadway were changing too, and the listings reflected some of the area’s problems. In the 1960s, the tenants included Narcotics Addiction, Inc. and the Lower East Side Service Center, another substance abuse help organization. Perhaps in response to a diminishing customer base, perhaps in response to increasing fear of crime, the cafeteria began closing at 2am and reopening at 5am. Then, it began closing at 10pm.

Author Mario Maffi describes a “lively scene of resistance to decay” around the Garden’s neighborhood in the 1970s. These activities included the Garden when CityArts, an organization engaged in art projects all over Manhattan, painted a mural titled “The Wall of Respect for Women” on the Garden’s outside wall in 1974 — a community-based artwork, Maffi says, that is remembered with pride by neighborhood residents.

Charles Metzger died in March of 1977, at the age of 81, by which time he was living in Florida. He had sold the cafeteria in 1976 to a group of Israelis, as Bert Feinberg recalls, after Feinberg no longer ran the family business. There is evidence the Garden was struggling by the end; it was closed by the Health Department for a time in 1981. Even though the Times reported in 1982 that the Garden was still dishing up fine Jewish food, the cafeteria finally closed for good in May of 1983. Feinberg doesn’t go back to the Lower East Side much anymore. He says he has no reason to visit these days.

Today, the Wing Shoon Restaurant, which opened in September of 1983 stands on the corner of Rutgers and East Broadway. There are new regulars, customers who have been coming for over twenty years with their families, and residents from a nearby elderly home. The owner, K.K. Wu, says he notices curiosity about the restaurant due to the history of the site from tourists and tour-goers. His own restaurant serves Cantonese-style food. Wing Shoon’s main chef, Mr. Wa, who has been with the restaurant since its opening, learned his trade at a famous Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong.

‘Wing Shoon,’ Wu explains, means “‘Everything comes easy and fluidly,” a name he says that has to do with arriving in America. Everyone comes to American to work here and earn a living, and all will hopefully do well and have good fortune, he explained. His restaurant, he reports, has done well. Wing Shoon sells two to three roast pigs each day. The lobster too, Wu says, is famous, and he believes it continues the tradition from the cafeteria’s days of selling lobster on this spot. Whether or not the kosher dairy cafeteria would have sold lobster, something of the legacy of the Garden certainly holds on here.

Cahan, Abraham. The Education of Abraham Cahan. Trans. Stein Leon. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969.

Davidson, Bruce. Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side. Madison: University of Wisconsin P, 2004.

Educational Alliance senior program. Interviews with participants by Emma Jacobs for Place Matters, June 21, 2007.

Feinberg, Bert. Interviewed by Emma Jacobs for Place Matters. May 13, 2007.

Invitation to ceremony honoring Charles Metzger. New York: Lower Manhattan Men’s Organization for Rehabilitation through Training, 1967.

K.K Wu. Interviewed by Marisa Yiu for Place Matters. Sept. 7, 2006.

Maffi, Mario. Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures on New York’s Lower East Side. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994.

Mendelsohn, Joyce. Lower East Side Remembered & Revisited.New York: Lower East Side P, 2001, 40.

Schoener, Allon. Portal to America: the Lower East Side 1870-1925. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1967.

The 1939 Guide to Union Restaurants, Cafeterias, Bars and Hotels compiled by the Local Joint Executive Board of New York City.

[Posted, August 2007]