Famous Ankles

When I think of “delis” in NYC, two images come to mind.  The first is the little places you see everywhere in this city.  In essence, they’re a variation of a Seven-Eleven store with some groceries and drinks and some food-to-go sorts of stuff.  They differ from a 7-11 in the sense that they often have a salad bar and a hot food bar that are extremely popular places to pick up lunch and dinner.  Famous Ankles frequents such places all too often.  In keeping with the “deli” idea, they will also have a place that will make sandwiches to order or grill burgers or toast bagels and the like.  Some of the delis will reduce the size of the groceries/salad bar areas and have more and more of what is normally considered a delicatessen sort of food made to order (and generally to go).

All in all, they’re a relatively cheap source of food and, when you find a good one, you tend to go often rather than cook (it’s NYC, cooking isn’t one of those things people generally do).

A second level of deli is a big step up in formality and quality.  These are the traditional Jewish delis and they are often kosher (but certainly not always) and they tend to be more restaurant-like in their operations.  Some of the famous ones like that are the Carnagie Deli and the Stage Deli.

Another one, not quite as famous, is the 2nd Avenue Deli.  (It’s the same place, but new location of the site of yesterday’s post on the Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame.)

It has several points of distinction.  First, for a place with that name…you’d think you’d have an idea of its location.  Hint:  it ain’t on 2nd Avenue.  It’s actually located on 33rd Street between 3rd Avenue and Lexington.  The original location had been on 2nd Avenue and it had been a place of some small measure of fame in the Lower East Side as one of the best places to get food.  But, in 2006 they closed that location and moved to the new one.  The owner wanted to keep the name, probably for both the history and the memory of its founder:  Abe Lebewohl.

Abe’s story appears pretty impressive.  He was a survivor of the Holocaust and opened a thriving business in the Lower East Side when it was still a heavily Jewish area and stayed as the area went into a downward spiral and then started coming back.  He appears to have been a patron of the Jewish Theater and created a Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame that still exists at the old location (as noted, posted yesterday).

In 1996, he was murdered while at work.  The murder has never been solved.

As you can see, the window of the restaurant still has the wanted poster in the window.

Someday soon, I’ll eat there and post on my experience.

-H

This entry was posted on February 21, 2008 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Manhattan, Mid-town, Wanderings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.