Go to hell and bake bagels

January 10, 2020 7:18 AM

How New York's Bagel Union Fought - and Beat - a Mafia Takeover
posted by gaspode (9 comments total)

So my question is "what happened to the threats of violence?" Was it just a bluff?
posted by Pembquist at 8:10 AM on January 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

They were, after all, virtually the only men in town capable of making a proper bagel, not to mention exceedingly judicious when it came to imparting their wisdom.

Montrealers are very glad this "wisdom" was so well contained.
posted by srboisvert at 8:20 AM on January 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

Montrealers are very glad this "wisdom" was so well contained.

Pretty sure TFA blames a canadian for the improvements on bagel-rolling-machines that contributed to the demise of the bagel cartel.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 8:27 AM on January 10, 2020

Imagining if Chicagoans were as needy for approval as Canadians are about bagels whenever NYC pizza was mentioned.
posted by Space Coyote at 9:22 AM on January 10, 2020 [6 favorites]

Bonus links: Barry Popink has n excerpt of the 1944 bagel theft article

15 February 1944, Troy (NY) Record, “Bagel Mystery Baffles Police,” pg. 1, col. 3:
New York (AP)—The theft of a truckload of 1,560 bagels yesterday confronted police with a mystery—they wanted to know what a bagel was.

Sam Elder, of Fisher’s Bagel Bakery, explained. He said a bagel was a roll with a hole in the middle. Some people like them for breakfast.

The Forgotten History of New York’s Bagel Famines -- Remembering Local 338 and the world’s toughest bagel bakers. (Atlas Obscura, 2018)

Bagel bakers renegotiated their contracts every year. And if they didn’t get what they wanted, they went on strike, plunging the city into what the Times called “bagel famine.” In December 1951, 32 out of 34 bagel bakeries closed, leaving shelves bare and sending lox sales shooting down by as much as 50 percent. Normally, the city’s bagel fiends ate 1,200,000 in a weekend—now, there were nearly none. Shopkeepers substituted bagels with whatever they could, variously throwing seeded rolls and Bialys into the void, but nothing else would do. (The strike was eventually resolved with mediation from the State Board of Mediation’s Murray Nathan, who had reportedly “helped settle the lox strike of 1947.”)

Now I want a proper bagel.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:18 AM on January 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

It also explains why Lender's bagels are less than stellar:

The showdown with Bagel Boys served to obscure another issue on the union’s docket — one with far more lasting repercussions. Lender’s bagels had been in operation since 1927 in New Haven, Connecticut. It was outside the purview of Local 338, so when, only months before Bagel Boys opened its doors, Lender’s leased a Thompson’s bagel machine of its own, the union paid it little mind. This was a mistake.

posted by JawnBigboote at 5:47 PM on January 10, 2020

Pretty sure TFA blames a canadian for the improvements on bagel-rolling-machines that contributed to the demise of the bagel cartel.

Don't be confusing a generic Canadian with a Montrealer. Tabernac!

Montrealers also make some of the greatest bagels on earth. And you can order them online.
posted by srboisvert at 7:21 PM on January 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

Montrealers also make some of the greatest bagels on earth.

I keep hearing this. My wife is from Quebec and, for her sake, I spent several weeks trying to make myself see what's so good about "Montreal bagels." I failed. Unlike New Haven pizza, which is self-evidently its own worthwhile branch on the pizza family tree, Montreal bagels are just not as good as NY bagels. Order them if you want. Me? I'm going to Shelskys.
posted by 1adam12 at 3:50 AM on January 11, 2020

New Yorkers who get really lost in Boston and somehow find themselves in the outer neighborhood of West Roxbury, which is hardly known as a center of Jewish life (save for all the Jewish cemeteries out near the Dedham line), might be startled by a bagel place on Centre Street called Local 338. They truck their dough up from New York and finish cooking them locally. It's a decent place with good coffee and nice owners, but the bagels taste nothing like New York bagels.
posted by adamg at 6:00 PM on January 11, 2020