The Lunchtime Theater - Chicago Footage During the Great Depression. 1936

THE DIGITAL RESEARCH LIBRARY OF ILLINOIS HISTORY JOURNAL™ PRESENTS

THE LUNCHTIME THEATER.

Chicago Footage During the Great Depression. 1936

The History of the Family Owned Ashkenaz Restaurants and Delis of Chicago, Illinois. (1910-2012)

The Ashkenaz restaurant, at 1432 W. Morse Avenue in Rogers Park, was one of the authentic delis, serving Vienna corned beef, Rosen's rye bread, Litberg bagels, and Vita lox.

1432 W. Morse Avenue in the Rogers Park community of Chicago, Illinois.

As you enter, there is a long delicatessen counter on the right filled with trays of amber smoked chubs, chopped chicken livers, potato salad, perogen (small baked pastries filled with chopped chicken livers and onion, etc.), gefilte fish, kishkes, and pickles. Gleaming red Vienna salamis hung from a rack on the wall.

One wall of the restaurant is somber brown; the other is a mosaic of green, blue, and yellow tiles, an imitation ─ intentional or not ─ of the colors used by Marc Chagall in his evocative paintings of Jewish life in the villages of old Russia.

Beyond the counter in front is an open kitchen manned by four cooks who prepare short orders and sandwiches. The waitresses were blonde buxom and inured to the constant chirping: "Sweetie, how about another cuppa?"

A steady hum of conversation is assertive, argumentative, and studded with friendly insults and retorts. "When are you going to retire?" a customer asks of a cook working at the meat slicer. "When I have your money!" the cook shoots back. A portly man with a Nikon camera says thru a mouthful of sauerkraut: "Was I busy? Today, I shot two weddings and a bar mitzvah."

Meanwhile, everybody eats. Orders were ample, with the potato salad partly hiding the smoked fish and moderate prices. The Ashkenaz menu lists over 100 dishes, and 35 dinners are served weekly. Not all the items are Jewish cuisine ─ beef stew is listed next to gefilte fish, and barbecued spareribs next to stuffed kishkes with brown sauce.

sidebar

Comedian Shecky Greene was a once-famous son of the Rogers Park neighborhood. We know the true nature of Shecky Greene’s attachment to Ashkenaz and of the Shecky Greene sandwich because long-time New York Times sports writer Ira Berkow is also a native of the Morse Avenue neighborhood and wrote about it for the Tribune.

Berkow wrote,  "The Shecky Greene sandwich was named in his honor at Ashkenaz as the neighborhood's ultimate tribute to a local boy made good. The sandwich consisted of a double-decker of corned beef and egg, lettuce, tomato and a generous dollop of potato salad spilling onto the plate. That and their barbecue beef sandwich with the special Ashkenaz hot sauce that made you cross-eyed with the first taste were favorites in the mid-1950s."

Shecky Greene Comedian, 1965.

Kishkes with Brown Sauce

At the counter's far end was an archway leading to a dining room served from a second kitchen in the rear. The atmosphere in the dining room is relaxed and casual, and the diners chat from table to table. The tone is that of a family gathering.

Sam Ashkenaz at the Deli Counter.

Sam Ashkenaz, the owner, had a gentle manner that masks his shrewd business ability. He looked and spoke somewhat like entertainer George Burns, with a raspy but soothing voice and a twinkling expression. It was often hard to tell whether he was serious. One of his favorite topics of conversation was the origin of the restaurant.

His parents, George and Ada Ashkenaz, immigrated from Russia early in the 1900s and first opened a small delicatessen store near Roosevelt and Karlov in 1910. 

When the Jewish population moved north and west to the suburbs, the Ashkenaz family moved to Rogers Park, opening their first deli on Morse Avenue. It was a 10 by 30 feet small restaurant in which Ada Ashkenaz cooked in a tiny kitchen at the rear. During the mid-30s, they acquired a space at 1432 West Morse Avenue and opened a new restaurant. It burned in 1939, and the couple had no insurance.

Noodle Kugel

Sam Ashkenaz graduated from Purdue that year with a degree in electrical engineering. He joined his parents to help recoup the loss, borrowed money from the restaurant's suppliers, fixed the restaurant and was back in business in 1940.

Potato Latkes

At Ashkenaz, a typical dinner may start with an appetizer such as chopped chicken livers, various kinds of herring, or a piece of small gefilte fish with red beet horseradish.

Gefilte Fish

Homemade Chicken Soup with Kreplach

Next is chicken soup with matzo balls made entirely of matzo-meal dough or kreplach (a meat-filled dumpling for chicken soup). Chicken soup was served daily, and then there were the day's soups, such as barley, potato, bean, or cabbage ─ thick, rich, with a minimum of liquid. "We don't serve a cup of soup," said Sam Ashkenaz with contempt. "Ten-ounce bowl with the dinner, 12-ounce bowl a la carte." 

The best-seller was Corned Beef and Pastrami sandwiches. They served up over a ½ ton (1,000 pounds) of Corned Beef per month. 

Corned Beef - Sandwiches Piled High!

The "Family Recipe" blintzes were a popular entree; a thin pancake rolled and filled with cheese topped with fresh fruit, meat-filled or fruit-filled blintzes were invariably served with a decent dollop of sour cream.

Cheese Blintz with Cherries.

Jewish cuisine reaches a hedonistic gastronomic status in its sweet and sour cooking of meats and fish, and one of Ashkenaz's specialties was sweet and sour pickled trout. Most pickled fish is cooked with lemon as the souring agent, but Ashkenaz has a secret souring ingredient that produces a more piquant flavor. Many housewives came to Ashkenaz and asked how the flavor of their pickled trout is derived, but did he tell?

The restaurant had a bakery with a line of pastries that included an excellent cheesecake. A large deli in New York City, Reuben's, makes a cherry cheesecake that some Chicagoans ordered by mail.

Ashkenaz admits freely that Reuben's cheesecake is delicious, but he points out that it is heavy and difficult to eat after a good meal, while his cheesecake is lighter. 

After sampling a slice, you'd have to agree with him. Ashkenaz's cheesecake was topped with a triumphal glace, the color of rubies, filled with fresh strawberries.

So, what is a deli? It's a restaurant serving a great variety of foods with exotic flavors. Although it is Jewish, the food is derived from many European cultures. It isn't haute cuisine such as that created by French chefs like Escoffier; it is humble food ─ Jews who came here from Europe were poor.

But the food is prepared with loving care; its Escoffier was a formidable matriarch, the Jewish mother, who believed "Nobody should go away hungry." Is it possible that this type of restaurant, with its superior menu and vivacious atmosphere, is on the way out? You should live so long.

Ashkenaz Restaurant and Delicatessen was an institution that presided over Morse Avenue for years, within the shadow of the "L" tracks, until the late 1970s when they sold the Morse location.

Though there are different versions of why and how Sam Ashkenaz left the Morse location, he purposely moved the restaurant directly to the then brand-new Northbrook Court in 1976. That news made the Daily News Beeline column in December 1975. In fact, the once humble neighborhood Jewish restaurant was considered a real draw by Northbrook Court and by what would be one of its more high-profile tenants.

So, how long did Ashkenaz last at Northbrook Court? The trail abruptly ends in newspapers and on the internet, so I have no idea. It probably wasn't long since several people from the Northbrook area only slightly remembered that Ashkenaz was ever there. Sam Ashkenaz's son, Steve, worked at the local Carnegie Deli in 1990 and briefly at another deli that made the paper in 1989. Steve would have been at the family business if it were still around, so we can assume that Sam Ashkenaz's restaurant in Northbrook Court lasted about ten years or less.

After Ashkenaz left Morse Street, a place called "Ashkey's" replaced it, also serving Jewish deli food—apparently run by new people pirating the old name. A fire destroyed the building in 1978, ending Ashkey's, whoever owned it.

In the late 1970s, an Ashkenaz location would temporarily pop up in the North Shore suburb Wilmette at 3223 West Lake Street. 

Sam Ashkenaz died on November 25, 1985, at 71 years old. 

Ashkenaz Delicatessen, 12 East Cedar Street, Chicago.

A short-lived location opened at 3223 West Lake Street; another place at 12 East Cedar operated from about 1978 until 2012. However, those locations are always mentioned in newspapers as belonging to a corporation, and it's unclear if the Ashkenaz family ever owned either spot. But the Cedar location was open long enough—almost 35 years—to be called a "neighborhood staple." 

sidebar

A Jewish resident in the Gold Coast neighborhood said that the first two calls you make when someone dies are to the decesed family and to Ashkenaz to order deli trays for shiva. That suggests both the overlooked deli’s importance to its neighborhood . . .  and why it closed, as its core clientele increasingly passed away.

Restauranteur Howard Cohan bought the business in 2005. It was so well known that, strangely, New York Magazine, of all places, noted its passing in 2012.

VISIT OUR ASHKENAZ DELI & RESTAURANT SOUVENIR SHOP

INDEX TO MY ILLINOIS AND CHICAGO FOOD & RESTAURANT ARTICLES.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

#JewishThemed #JewishLife

Daniel Hale Williams Completes First Open-Heart Surgery in Chicago in 1893.

Daniel Hale Williams was the son of a barber, founded the first negro-owned hospital in America, and performed the world's first successful heart surgery in 1893.

July 10, 1893

Williams was born in 1858 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, the fifth of seven children. After his father died, his mother, Sara Price Williams, moved the family several times. Young Daniel started as a shoemaker but quickly knew he wanted more education. He completed secondary school in Wisconsin. At age 20, Williams became an apprentice to a former surgeon general for Wisconsin. Williams studied medicine at Chicago Medical College.

After his internship, he went into private practice in an integrated neighborhood on Chicago's south side. He soon began teaching anatomy at Chicago Medical College and served as surgeon to the City Railway Company. In 1889, the governor of Illinois appointed him to the state's board of health.

Determined that Chicago should have a hospital where negro and white doctors could study, and negro nurses could receive training, Williams rallied for a hospital open to all races. After months of hard work, he opened Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses on May 4, 1891, the country's first interracial hospital and nursing school.

1891-1893: 29th and Dearborn Streets, Chicago.

One hot summer night in 1893, a young Chicagoan named James Cornish was stabbed in the chest and rushed to Provident. When Cornish started to go into shock, Williams suspected a deeper wound near the heart. He asked six doctors (four white, two negro) to observe while he operated. In a cramped operating room with crude anesthesia, Williams inspected the wound between two ribs, exposing the breastbone. He cut the rib cartilage and created a small trapdoor to the heart.

1894-1908: 36th and South Dearborn Streets, Chicago.

Underneath, he found a damaged left internal mammary artery and sutured it. Then, inspecting the pericardium (the sac around the heart), he saw that the knife had left a gash near the right coronary artery. With the heart beating and transfusion impossible, Williams rinsed the wound with salt solution, held the edges of the palpitating wound with forceps, and sewed them together. Just 51 days after his apparently lethal wound, James Cornish walked out of the hospital. He lived for over 20 years after the surgery. The landmark operation was hailed in the press.

In 1894, Dr. Williams became chief surgeon of Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C., the most prestigious medical post available to Negros then. There, he made improvements that reduced the hospital's mortality rate. In 1895, he helped organize the National Medical Association for negro professionals barred from the American Medical Association. Williams returned to Chicago and continued as a surgeon. In 1913, he became the first negro to be inducted into the American College of Surgeons.

1908-1933: 1315 West Garfield Boulevard, Chicago.

As a sign of the esteem of the negro medical community, until this day, a "code blue" at the Howard University Hospital emergency room is called a "Dr. Dan." In words that could later be said of Vivien Thomas, a colleague wrote, "His greatest pride was that directly or indirectly, he had a hand in the making of most of the outstanding Negro surgeons of the current generation."

Provident Hospital began offering graduate education for Black medical school graduates in 1917.

Dr. Williams died in 1931. The Daniel Hale Williams Medical Reading Club in Washington, D.C., commemorates his achievements.

1891-1893: 29th and Dearborn Streets. The hospital's first location was a three-story brick house with 12 beds.

1894-1908: 36th and South Dearborn Streets. Designed for hospital use with 50 beds.

Both of the above locations were in the Douglas Community and in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, which was the center of the city's negro community at the time.

1908-1933: 1315 West Garfield Boulevard.

1933-1987: 426 East 51st Street, Chicago.

1993-Pres: 500 East 51st Street, Chicago.

sidebar 

The Daniel Hale Williams Preparatory School of Medicine at DuSable (High School), 4934 South Wabash (Bronzeville neighborhood), Chicago, is a medical magnet school named in his honor when it opened in September 2005. Helping minority students get into medical school and become future members of the medical field is central to Daniel Hale Williams' mission and vision.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.