Seated in his office on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in front of a large portrait of company patriarch Aron Streit, Alan Adler avoids becoming too nostalgic.
“It’s like I tell my family members: None of you own a car from 1935, why do you think a matzah factory from 1935 is what we should be using today?” said Adler, one of Streit’s Matzos’ 11 co-owners.
This is the line of thought behind the imminent closing of the Streit’s matzah factory, a Jewish fixture in a neighborhood that once was home to one of the highest concentration of Jews in the country.
Streit’s, the last family-owned matzah company in the United States, announced in December that it would permanently close its 90-year-old factory after this Passover season because of longstanding mechanical problems and economic concerns. Sometime in April, the company will shift its matzah production either to its other factory across the river in New Jersey, where several other products such as macaroons and wafers are made, or to another location outside Manhattan.
The greatly gentrified Lower East Side has seen its real estate values skyrocket in recent decades. Although Streit’s has not yet identified a buyer for its landmark building on Rivington Street, the property was estimated to be worth $25 million in 2008, when the company first considered shuttering the factory.
“We should’ve been out of here five or 10 years ago,” said Adler, 63, who oversees the company’s day-to-day operations along with two cousins. “But we feel committed to the men [who work here] and we feel committed to the neighborhood, so we tried to keep this place afloat as long as we could. We probably could’ve stayed here even longer if I could’ve found somebody to work on the ovens.”
The ovens, identified only by “Springfield, Mass.” on their side, date to the 1930s. They are 75 feet long and are continuously fed a thin sheet of dough that emerges from the convection heat in perfect crisp form. Streit’s does not disclose its official production numbers, but Adler said the factory churns out millions of pounds of matzah each year.
However, Adler also estimated the ovens are now about 25 percent slower than they used to be and he cannot find a mechanic to fix them.
The ovens aren’t the only outdated element of the factory. Except for a few electrical parts added to the machinery over the years, nearly all the equipment is more than 70 years old. As a result, employees’ tasks have barely changed in half a century — from mixing the flour in small batches (so the matzah is finished in under 18 minutes to satisfy kosher requirements) to separating the matzah sheets into pieces that travel up to higher floors on a conveyor belt.
“Nothing changes at Streit’s,” said Rabbi Mayer Kirshner, who oversees the factory’s kosher certification.
However, plenty has changed in the matzah business since Adler’s childhood in the 1950s and ’60s, when he liked to spend time picking fresh matzah out of the ovens. Back in the “heyday,” as Adler called it, of the 1930s through the 1960s, there were four matzah factories in the New York metropolitan area: Horowitz-Margareten and Goodman’s in Queens, Manischewitz in New Jersey and Streit’s in Manhattan. Horowitz-Margareten and Goodman’s were sold to Manischewitz, which was bought by the private equity firm Kohlberg & Company in 1990. (Today it is owned by Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s former investment firm.)
The Streit’s factory also used to boast a vibrant storefront with lines that spilled outside and around the corner. Today there is still a retail counter, but often it is left unmanned.
“Families have moved on,” Adler said. “The Lower East Side has changed, so now we’ve transitioned from a local bakery where people would stop by and pick up their matzah hot out of the oven in 1925 to now, where 99.9 percent of our sales are wholesale to distributors who resell.
“I don’t know what they’ll do with this building now,” he said.