Forward Building

Home of the most widely read Yiddish newspaper, which taught immigrants how to live in America

Local name: Forward Building

Collection: The Lower East Side and Chinatown · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The Forward Building on East Broadway · Jim.henderson, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the ten-story building of the Jewish Daily Forward, in Yiddish “Forverts.” Socialists founded the Yiddish newspaper in 1897. For nearly fifty years it was run by the editor Abraham Cahan. Born in 1860 near Vilna, Cahan arrived in New York in 1882. The paper’s readers were immigrants like him, Jewish working people from Eastern Europe crowded into the tenements of the Lower East Side. Cahan wanted plain language and stories about real life. Readers sent in letters about love, work and family quarrels, and the paper answered them in a column called the “Bintel Brief,” “a bundle of letters.” By the mid-1920s circulation had passed two hundred and fifty thousand. It was the largest foreign-language newspaper in the country. The building went up in 1912, designed by the architect George A. Boehm. It was made tall on purpose: nearby stood Jarmulowsky’s bank, the great symbol of capital in the neighborhood, and the building’s height was the answer to it. Jewish labor unions and the Workmen’s Circle, a mutual aid society, moved in. Look at the facade: above the entrance are flaming torches, and four medallions hold the profiles of socialists. Among them are Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Ferdinand Lassalle; the fourth is identified in different ways. Later, Chinese organizations used the building, and the medallions were covered with panels bearing Chinese characters. The newspaper moved out in the 1970s, and in 2006 the building was turned into apartments.

Visiting

173–175 East Broadway, across from Seward Park, Lower East Side. The building is private apartments, so view the facade from the street. The four medallions are above the entrance arch, on either side of the words “Forward Building.”