Paper Bag Players Sign Disappears From 185 East Broadway

     

      After almost forty years, the simple block letter sign reading "Paper Bag Players" was taken out of the window at 185 East Broadway, almost a year after the building sold for 6.1 million dollars. Founded in 1958 (four years after the start of Joe Papp's "New York Shakespeare Festival", later Shakespeare in the Park, which first held productions at the nearby East River Amphitheater) the Paper Bag Players are a non-profit children's theater group which in many respects attempted to meld aspects of alternative theater with programming for children's education, arriving at 185 East Broadway around 1981. I called and spoke to somebody at Paper Bag Players a week ago and was told they had relocated uptown, having permanently left their space at 185 East Broadway after the building was sold.

      I wish to speak briefly on the history of 185 East Broadway, but in doing so must include 183 and 187 East Broadway as well (to the right and left respectively). Given that it's me and my twin sister's birthday today, it's fitting that this post touches upon 183, as we grew up on the top floor, my father having moved in 1979. In 2005, after years of legal battling, the building was condemned, we were evicted, and the owners, the West Lake Noodle company (which had operated its import-export business out of the ground floor my entire childhood) moved ahead with their plans to demolish the building and build in its place a luxury condominium tower to loom over the neighboring Forward Building (which had up until that point been, as I remember it, somewhat neglected, largely serving as a sort of Chinese community center and meeting site for religious organizations - until 2004 when new developers began its transition into a luxury apartment building). In the end, there were numbers of zoning issues with the plans, clashes with Community Board 3, the financial collapse of 2007-2008, yadah yadah - now, there only stands a squat cement and glass structure where my old building one stood, connected to the "West Lake Terrace Apartments" at 171 Henry Street on the opposite end of the lot.
      At the beginning of the 20th century this stretch of East Broadway and Canal, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, was known to some as "Yiddish Newspaper Row". While the most famous feature remains the Forward Building at 175 East Broadway, at time the time of its construction in 1912 the only "skyscraper" on the Lower East Side (serving as the home of the socialist newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward, or Forverts) - it was brick buildings like the ones at 183-187 which served as the primary print shops for these papers (which peaked between the 1910's and 1930's at circulations in the hundreds of thousands), as well as serving as ground-floor storefronts for the numbers of other smaller Yiddish and Hebrew publications which dotted the neighborhood. [I could, and probably will, make an entire other post about the Forverts, and won't get into it now - its history is incredibly fascinating and can be readily found online.] 
      While the conventional narrative is that the Lower East Side stopped being a "Jewish neighborhood" by the 1950's (and this is not completely incorrect), I feel like this picture is largely concerned with the idea of a Jewish "middle class", while many alternative (even "radical") dimensions of Jewish life maintained their critical cultural roles within the LES through the 1970's. Despite the decline in circulation of many of these Jewish (often socialist or communist in affiliation) newspapers maintained their operations in these buildings until they couldn't go on any longer, stopping the pressed and selling their buildings by the end of the 70's. Some of these newspapers banded together, reform journals with orthodox dailies, Stalinists with Leninists - holding onto a dwindling readership and disappearing community. The Jewish Daily News (or the Yiddishe Tageblatt), the first Yiddish daily newspaper published in New York, lived at 185 East Broadway until 1928, when it merged with the Jewish Morning Journal (the Morgn Zhurnal). In 1952, the Morning Journal, a conservative Jewish publication, merged with Der Tog (the Yiddish Day), which was housed at 183 East Broadway, with 185 East Broadway presumably sold to the owner who held it through the 80's. The Yiddish Day was a liberal publication which partly absorbed Di Varhayt (the Truth) the fist Yiddish Communist paper in the world, based in Petrograd, which ran for a couple years after the October Revolution before being forced to relocate. Der Tog-Morgn Zhurnal continued to operate out of 183 East Broadway until only a few years before my father moved in and joined other artists living, maintaining, and restoring this building.