"Meet the sit down bagel"
From Poland to the Lower East Side to Bagel Baker Union 338 to New York Bagel & Bialy in Lincolnwood, IL to New York Bagels & Delicatessen in Milwaukee - no wonder the bagel needed to sit down.
When I first started out on my quest last year, it occurred to me that if I am going to be a self-appointed bagel expert I need to be able to talk like one. When asked, I would need to be able to describe what makes a bagel a great bagel. I could no longer take the same approach with defining the bagel that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart took with defining pornography, that I will “know it when I see it”. I did know a great bagel when I tasted it, but I was going to need some descriptive words to talk about what separated the bagel wheat from the bagel chaff.
Early in my research I came across a headline from a 1951 New York Times article that got me on the right path about bagel production techniques. From the Bagel Famine Threatens in City; Labor Dispute Puts a Hole in Supply article I learned about the truly iconic Bagel Baker Local 338. Which led me to Matthew Goodman’s article, The Rise and Fall of the Bagel which led me to Maria Balinska’s book, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread which led me to the Hebrew Bakers Union and before I knew it I had answers for the follow-up questions. I will write more about this union later, but I became a bit obsessed with them. My very first day of bagel questing in Chicago took me to Lincolnwood, IL to visit New York Bagel & Bialy, which was opened in the 1960s by several bakers who had been in Bagel Baker 338. I was so excited to make this connection on my very first outing, that for a few months I toyed with the idea to drive around the Midwest looking for the offspring of BB 338. While eating hot out of the oven bagels and talking with the wife and daughter of the owners, I learned that one of the original founders of this bagel shop, opened up a bagel shop in Milwaukee in 1970.
Yesterday, I spent half a day in the basement archives of the Milwaukee Jewish History Museum reading through the digital archives of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. Typing ‘bagel’ into the search engine gave me more than 1,000 entries to read and affirmed my belief that I can trace history through the bagel. I found the 1974 ad campaigns for New York Bagels & Delicatessen, a slight name change from New York Bagels & Bialy when it opened four years earlier…carrying the name from the Lincolnwood bagel shop. Now that they attached a delicatessen to the bagel shop they were doing what they could to make sitting down and eating a bagel (and buying more expensive deli foods) a thing. It isn’t ‘just that the 1970s had better outfits and better investment in public infrastructure, it also had better bagel ads. Because if I have learned anything from sorting through bagel ads from the 1940s to the 2000s in the Midwest Jewish newspaper digital archives, the 1970s was the most creative decade for bagel ad campaigns.
Thank you for this bit of history about my local bagel joint!