A life in cakes
Herb Grosinger of the Upper West Side, New Milford, and Woodland Park talks pastries
Yes, this is anecdotal, but bakeries seem to be making a bit of a comeback. They’re less local now than they are artisanal, with each crumb carefully curated and every bite both stunningly delicious and spectacularly expensive.
There seems to have been a bit of a baked-good desert (not dessert!) before then, when all but the geographically luckiest of shoppers had to rely on supermarkets.
But before that, in the golden age of bakeries, there were little neighborhood stores, family businesses, that didn’t seem big enough to produce all the cakes and breads and danishes and rugelach and pies that could fill the room with the aroma of heaven. Although some of them were disappointingly pedestrian, many were hidden gems. And then there were the famous ones, the ones that people would trek to. The ones that people still dream about.
One of those legendary places was Grossinger’s Bakery, which was an Upper West Side mecca for cake-lovers. To be accurate, there were two Grossinger’s, one a bit more uptown, at Columbus and 88th; the first one at Columbus and 76th, closed in 1991, and the second went out with the century and the millennium, in 1999.
So why is this a local story for New Jersey readers? Because Herb Grosinger (and yes, his name is spelled correctly; there is the conventional second S in the bakery’s name, but not in the family name, and yes, there is a story involved, because in all things Grosinger or Grossinger there is a story involved), who took the bakery over from his parents, who created and ran and lived and breathed it, when his father died in 1972, has lived in New Jersey for about 40 years. He and his wife, Myra, made their home in New Milford. That’s where their children grew up. Myra died in 2015. Almost four years ago, after Myra died, Herb moved to Woodland Park, where he still lives.
So although his early life was thoroughly bound up in the Upper West Side neighborhood where he grew up, the second part of his life just shows how effectively the George Washington Bridge and Lincoln Tunnel dissolve barriers.
So. The bakery.
Mr. Grosinger told his story in a book, “Breaking Eggs in New York City,” that he published in 2022, and he retold some of it on a recent morning in a café in Montclair.
He begins in 1914 when his father, 15-year-old Ernest — Erno then, to be precise — left Transylvania for the United States, to rejoin his parents. Ernest’s father, Martin, took off for the United States to make his fortune in 1902. In 1905, Sadie joined him in the New World, and took her younger child, Rachel with her, but she left 6-year-old Ernest with his grandparents, promising to return.
She didn’t.
His father did come back for him, but he was a gruff, handlebar-mustachioed stranger, who threatened to put his son, who wanted to stay with his grandparents, in a sack to drag him on the boat. Ernest stayed with his grandparents.
A few years later, though, his grandparents died, and Ernest agreed to accompany some cousins to America.
“As they were getting on the boat, my father was watching two of his cousins — children — who were running around the ship. There was a gypsy who was selling eggs from a big basket full of them. My father tried to jump over the basket, but he fell into it.”
The eggs broke. The gypsy was understandably enraged. She cursed Ernest, in Hungarian; translated into English, she said “You break eggs. You will always break eggs! Your children will break eggs.”
It was less a curse than a prophecy; in the end, Mr. Grosinger said, actually it proved to be a blessing.
Martin and Sadie worked hard at unglamorous, often difficult, rarely intellectually engaging jobs. She was a housekeeper, and he did manual labor, including a stint on the Panama Canal. (Mr. Grosinger checked the database to see if that family legend was true. It was.) What was that like? “Very hot, and full of mosquitos,” Martin reported, according to Mr. Grosinger’s book. “All around, people were collapsing from the heat.” It was very far from Transylvania.
Mr. Grosinger’s mother, Isabella, arrived in New York in 1929, when she was 19. She came from Romania and spoke Hungarian — back then Transylvania bounced back and forth between Hungary and Romania, and if you lived there, it was best to know both languages. His parents spoke Hungarian at home, Mr. Grosinger said; it played the part of Yiddish in many other Jewish immigrant households. It was the language of secrets.
Isabella was the youngest of a family of nine children. One of her two brothers, Frank, already had gone to America; her favorite sister, Honey, was forced to stay behind, and like the other siblings still in Europe was murdered in the Holocaust. Saying goodbye to family members then often was goodbye forever.
Ernest and Isabella were cousins; they met and married in 1930, during the Depression, and worked together for the rest of their lives. By the time they married, Ernest already had begun to work in bakeries and pastry shops; he started a few, which flourished until they didn’t. He learned his trade from a famous pastry chef who in reality was Hungarian but renamed himself to sound French, because “being Hungarian doesn’t sell pastries,” Mr. Grosinger said. “Being French sells them.”
Eventually the family moved uptown and opened the 76th Street store and then, much later, the one on 88th Street. The family lived above the original store. “I was born above the bakery in 1939,” Mr. Grosinger said. “It was at 60 West 76th Street, at the southeast corner of Columbus.” His parents had three children, he added — him, his brother, Eugene, and the store. And if he had to say which child they loved the most, well, it might have been the one that never talked back to them.
Not that the store never talked to them at all.
“My father wired a telephone up from the bakery to our apartment on the fourth floor,” Mr. Grosinger said. “And there was a buzzer system. If we were having dinner, the store could buzz upstairs to say, ‘Mrs. Schwartz is here for her cake.’ The business came first.”
According to family lore, which cannot be proven but also cannot be disproven, and well might be true, and if there is any justice in the world should be true, Ernest “introduced ice cream cakes to New York, as a perfect two-in-one,” Mr. Grosinger said. “You had cake. You had ice cream. My father put them together.
“Our store was a block from the Thanksgiving parade, and everyone came in for it. The police came in. The clowns came in. Everyone came in.
“A few years later, my father came up with the coffee praline ice cream cake. To this day, no one else makes it.” That’s not from lack of trying. “The wife of the owner of Baskin-Robbins came into the bakery and bought a huge praline cake and raved about it. And all of a sudden, you had Baskin-Robbins praline cake ice cream.” But they didn’t have the cake. That was a Grossinger’s exclusive.
Grossinger’s would sell the praline cake to restaurants like Lutece, the extremely high-end, high-prestige restaurant that wouldn’t like to be seen buying cakes from a neighborhood Jewish bakery. But it did. So did many other fancy restaurants. “I told them to give it a French name, and not to say that it came from Grossinger’s,” he said.
Mr. Grosinger has a story about Helena Rubinstein, the famous cosmetics mogul. “She used to order cakes from us,” he said. “We even named a cake after her.
“She said to my mother, ‘This praline cake is very good, but it is very sweet and rich. Can you make it less rich?’ My mother said, ‘This is the way we make it. But what if we add raspberry sherbet? Why don’t we try?’
“That was the Helena Rubinstein cake.”
And then there’s the pumpkin cheesecake that the bakery made for Thanksgiving. “People who have had that cake never seem to forget it,” he said.
“My parents worked seven days a week,” Mr. Grosinger said. “My mother used to say, ‘I don’t count. You don’t count. The customers count.’ She was dedicated. She lost her family in the concentration camps. The bakery was her salvation.
“She was in the front of the business, and my father was in the back. If customers came in and said, ‘Mrs. Grosinger, you made such a wonderful cake,’ when I was a little boy, I would say, ‘No, no. My father made the cake!’
“We made everything from scratch,” he continued. “We would make anything that someone wanted.”
Mr. Grosinger had a thoroughly mid-century Upper West Side childhood. “I went to PS 87 and then to Joan of Arc High School, and then to Charles Evans Hughes High School, and then I went to City College at night,” he said.
“My neighborhood was mostly European, and it was mixed,” he said. “There were Germans, Hungarians, Irish, and Jews.”
His family was Orthodox; they belonged to West Side Institutional Synagogue. The bakery was kosher and had a hechsher; it also was open on Shabbat. Things were different then.
“There was a tomboy on my block, of German descent. We played a lot together. Sports. We’d play handball up against the wall of the New York Historical Society, and we played stickball around the corner. Eventually the Museum of Natural History hired a security guard to chase us. There was a fire plug there, so people couldn’t park, so we could hit the ball from across the street. But we didn’t stop until someone came up with the idea of planting a huge tree on 77th Street, right off Central Park West. That finally got rid of us.
“76th Street was like our own fiefdom, and Central Park was our playground,” Mr. Grosinger said.
He and his friend went skiing together — neither of them knew how, but they got on a bus at 5 in the morning, went upstate, and learned how to ski that day. (Yes, he improved his skills later.)
The friend’s name was Elsa Ambruster; they stayed friends. And skiing was central to his life; he eventually met Myra through their shared love of the sport.
Mr. Grosinger tells many stories. They’re wonderful, if occasionally hard to check. Here’s one of the best:
“Two brothers who had come from the South were living in a welfare hotel on 77th Street,” he said. “They were being teased by one of the neighborhood gangs.” He’d pretty much forgotten about them when a friend reminded him. “I was 11 years old, and my friend brought me over to this kid who had a broken-down baby carriage. And my friend said, ‘Lee, show me what you have underneath the board.’ He lifted it up, and there was a BB gun. And I walked away.”
He was creeped out.
“Shortly afterward, there were some incidents in Central Park. Someone was firing a BB gun. And I remembered the incident, and I thought that somehow, he must have been connected to it.
“And then, incredibly, I had a friend whose father was a famous psychiatrist, who had started a youth house for troubled kids. This kid with the BB gun was brought to him. The school was manned by police officers. It was for very difficult kids. And the psychiatrist said that if this boy is not institutionalized, he will commit an act of violence against society.
“He was 14 years old then, and he ended up being released into his mother’s custody. It was Lee, the boy with the BB gun in the baby carriage.”
And Lee was Lee Harvey Oswald.
In 1960, Mr. Grosinger was drafted into the army; he trained at Fort Dix and then went to Fort Sam Houston in Texas. After his regular service was over, he stayed in the reserves for 6 1/2 years.
Mr. Grosinger finished his college education at Fairleigh Dickinson in Teaneck. After they married, he and Myra moved, first to Brooklyn, and then to New Milford. “I wanted to look for an apartment around the corner from the bakery, but my wife wanted us to be far away,” he said.
Myra Hirsh Grosinger was an artist and an art teacher. She sculpted, painted, and displayed her artwork. Herb and Myra had two children. Ron lives in Butler and teaches at Memorial High School in West New York. “He was hired as a wood shop teacher, but he was so into cars that he decided to teach kids how to convert gas cars to electric,” Mr. Grosinger said. “He has become one of the people the district goes to for information.” Liz Grosinger Samuel, who lives in Montclair, is an actress and the mother of two children, Isabelle and Oliver.
The family belonged to Congregation Beth Tikvah, which later became part of the JCC of Paramus. The family also belonged to Congregation Shir Shalom in Woodstock, Vermont.
After he graduated from Fairleigh, Mr. Grosinger became a stockbroker. “I was always interested in the market,” he said. “My father always used to talk about it.
“I was a stockbroker for about 12 years. But then my father passed away, and my mother couldn’t sell the business. She didn’t want to. She wouldn’t leave it. And she wasn’t well. She’d had a few heart attacks. So I decided that it was time for me to go into the business.”
He was torn about that choice. “I was reluctant,” he said.
“But I felt that I couldn’t allow the business to disappear. We had a good business. We had good bakers.”
Mr. Grosinger devotes many chapters in his book to the bakers who worked for his family. The loyalty that went in both directions is clear. Many of the bakery’s employees had known nothing about baking until they were hired. Then they were trusted, they were trained, and many of them, it turned out, were talented.
“One of our main bakers, Calvin Gillespie, had been in the army, and he held up stores in Europe, and was sent to Leavenworth,” the federal prison in Kansas. “He had been a cook in the army.” Martin Grosinger hired him. “My father said, ‘Go to the grocery and get me some peaches,’ and he swiped a bag of peaches. The grocer caught him, and said to my father, ‘You sent someone to swipe peaches?’ My father asked him, and he said, ‘I thought it was part of my job.’”
His father kept Mr. Gillespie on. He recognized something in him. “Calvin was very ambitious,” Mr. Grosinger said. He made a deal with another baker; he would get to the bakery very early and do some of the other man’s work in return for training. “Calvin became an excellent baker,” he said.
And that’s just one of the many stories about employees where the love comes through the prose.
The bakery finally closed because the rent eventually became just too high. It was painful — Mr. Grosinger still is very angry at the city, at then-mayor Ed Koch, at then-Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger, and at the city council in general for “crying crocodile tears,” he said. He quoted a Daily News headline: “Koch Tells Bakers Tough Cookies.”
Ooof.
Mr. Grosinger still bakes and still sells cakes — the famous praline ice cream cake, a pareve lemon ice cream soufflé, and cheesecake. “It’s almost like I can’t walk away from it,” he said. To learn more, and to order, email him at grossingerscakes@gmail.com or call (201) 248-1638.
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