Streit’s Matzo, the iconic unleavened purveyor, has sold its factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side after 90 years of operation. The family-owned company plans to relocate operations outside New York City, most likely to New Jersey. The factory will close in April, after Passover.
It’s not entirely unexpected: Streit’s first put the building on the market in 2008, announcing plans to relocate. The Rivington Street factory and storefront is made up of four tenement buildings, which have been purchased by an unidentified buyer whose plans likely include new construction.
Vox Tablet headed to the iconic matzoh institution during Passover in 2008 to document the factory during its busy season, thinking it might be the factory’s last—you can listen to the dispatch here.
Michael Green, who has been chronicling Streit’s Matzo for an upcoming documentary, wrote about the factory’s closure in Bowery Boogie: “For the Jewish community nationwide and for the descendants of immigrants of all backgrounds whose families passed through neighborhood over the course of the last century or who remain here, it is the loss of a connection to a Lower East Side that is ever more the domain of museums and memory than of daily life.”
Jill Zarin is, apparently, still the company’s spokesperson.
Previous: Documenting a New York City Matzoh Institution
Related: Before the Exodus
Stephanie Butnick is chief strategy officer of Tablet Magazine, co-founder of Tablet Studios, and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.
