Yonah Schimmel's Knish Bakery

The story

No New York politician in the last fifty years has been elected to office without at least one photograph showing him on the Lower East Side with a knish in his face. That line, cited in The Underground Gourmet, tells you everything about this place. Yonah Schimmel, an immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, started with a pushcart around 1910. The Houston Street location followed. As the Jewish Lower East Side receded decade by decade, the bakery stayed — one of the few remaining fixtures of a largely departed culture and cuisine.