Unions on the Square

Cooperative restaurants and workers’ rights served up in the Village

By D. Silverman

Union Square, named for the convergence of two great thoroughfares, once thrummed each May Day to the marching of the masses turned out for the annual International Workers’ Day rally. Unions upon Union.

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If the headline “Garment District Cafeteria Strike” doesn’t put a gurgle in your kishkes, you probably weren’t needing a noon meal in 1929. On April 4th, The New York Times reported that starting at 11 o’clock that morning, just before lunch, a walk-out was called which would affect 125 restaurants and cafeterias within the area from 25th to 39th Streets, and Sixth to Ninth Avenues.

Two thousand food-service employees were demanding higher pay with fewer hours. Though the workers were not yet members, the strike was organized under the Amalgamated Food Workers’ Union with collective bargaining for better work conditions the goal.

At the time, most cafeteria staff slogged through 12-hour shifts for six and a half days — a 78-hour work week. Pay was typically $12-15/week for busboys and dishwashers and $20-30 for cooks and countermen. Aside from a shorter 48-hour workweek of six eight-hour days, the workers demanded minimum weekly wages of $22 for the lower positions and starting at $50 for chefs. They also wanted a centralized employment agency and better sanitary conditions.

Garment workers, fur-trade and needle-trade workers, who were heavily unionized, were called upon to respect the picketers and boycott non-union cafeterias. Some restaurants reported losing $500 a day in sales.

The ongoing strike quickly became tempestuous: protesters were often loud and abrasive, the restaurant owners tried to undermine the strikers by offering bonuses to keep workers, or brought in thugs to assault the picketers; even smoke bombs were tossed about. There were reports of the police beating up the strikers, and people were being hauled off to Jefferson Market Court to face fines or imprisonment — sometimes with a detour to Bellevue first to care for their injuries. In barely two weeks 455 strikers had been arrested for “disorderly conduct” and many were sitting in jail unable to pay bail or fines.

Ultimately the strikers prevailed and most restaurant owners acceded to unionization and better employment terms. Unfortunately, for many of the workers those benefits proved short-lived — six months later the stock market belched and the resulting monetary indigestion ushered in the Great Depression. Many businesses failed and mass unemployment made theoretically-higher pay scales moot.

The model of a worker-friendly cafeteria was clearly evident a short walk away, at the ever-popular Proletcos Co-operative Restaurant and Cafeteria on Union Square East. In the summer of 1927, the Proletarian Cooperative (Proletcos) opened a 110-seat cafeteria at 30 U.S.E., between 15th/16th Streets, in the ground floor of the Freiheit (טייהיירפ) building, publisher of the Yiddish-language communist daily paper.

(Which brings up the conspicuous point that recent Eastern-European Jewish immigrants were so integral to NYC’s garment district workers, labor unions and Workers’ Party, that Yiddish served as a lingua franca to cut through the mishegas.)

Good prices, comfort food and camaraderie quickly had the place bursting at the aisles. According to one source, braised oxtail for 20¢ and stuffed miltz (cow’s spleen) were on the menu — in an age where cattle had yet to demand freedom from bondage.

In June 1928, with much fanfare, the cafeteria moved next door to a newly-renovated larger space, with seating for 300, at 26-28 U.S.E., the home of the Communist Party and publisher of the Daily Worker. Butts soon outnumbered seats however, and the comrades’ “destination” eatery was again packed.

The space was designed by the celebrated activist artist Hugo Gellert (born Grünbaum), whose illustrations regularly appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times, as well as New Masses and The Liberator. (Decades later he would create lobby murals for the Seward Park Coops on Grand Street, still visible today.)

A contemporaneous art review in The New Yorker enthused: “Its interest to you, we hope, will be in the stunning murals done by Hugo Gellert, at present the Daumier of the poor working classes… You, perhaps, are familiar with the technique: the lithograph-crayon method of wide planes and well-defined outlines… using squares of colored chalk on the dry plaster… The figures stand eight feet high and run the raucous, merry course from the front to the back, thirty or forty feet. The center panel depicts labor in all of its standing occupations. The front space is devoted to the mines, and the extreme rear group to the steel mills.”

The review concluded with this flourish: “We think the whole thing rather important. The Gellert murals are the only ones on this continent (except those of Rivera in Mexico City) that are really contemporary… If you are under forty, you will be sure to see them. If you are over, don’t go without your smelling salts.”

Though perhaps the best-dressed, Proletcos was by no means the first cooperative eatery in the city.

In 1911, David Dubinsky, the prominent labor leader who would go on to preside over the ILGWU for some 34 years, arrived in the U.S. as a teenager and set to work as a dishwasher. Soon-abouts, he and some friends founded a cooperative restaurant on East 10th Street between First and Second Avenues. The place only lasted a year or so, but that was long enough for him to flirt with a customer, Emma Goldberg, whom he wed in 1914. Mazel tov!

In 1920, Mary Ellicott Arnold organized a Cooperative Cafeteria at 49 East 25th Street. Successfully expanding into other cooperative businesses, housing, a credit union — by 1935 the group ran ten cafeterias across the city (by 1953 they ran none). Arnold was a Quaker from Staten Island, and she didn’t need a job in food service to meet her wife — she and Mabel Reed had been partners for many years by then.

In late September 1929, The New Yorker ran a Talk of the Town blurb declaring Proletcos the “Red Stronghold of the city,” and calling it “the only successful communistic cafeteria in this country.” Strong words! But the story continued “It is dedicated to the proposition that workers must eat cheap and talk. At any hour of the day scores of workers may be found sitting inside eating and talking, or just talking.”

Six hundred shareholder-workers owned the business, for which they each got a discount on meals, but otherwise, on principle, did not participate in any profits. This situation caused a conundrum earlier in the year when it was debated whether the staff should walk out in solidarity with the Garment District cafeteria strikers — but ultimately was deemed foolish to picket against themselves.

As quickly as the flame of fortune flared, it suddenly went out. Two months after the stock market crash of 1929, the cafeteria abruptly closed shortly before Christmas. A snarky and likely-spurious widely-reprinted news item stated the business was in bankruptcy, with liabilities over $100,000; however, the initial source appears to have been The Jewish Daily Forward, a competing Yiddish paper deeply at odds with Freiheit, over, among other disagreements, reactions to recent deadly riots in Palestine.

Another Talk of the Town item in January 1930 lamented “Proletcos has closed, and it is very confusing. There are those who say it was successful but that its managers, living up to their non-profit policy, were diverting some of the income to osther communistic activities… The publication [Daily Worker] blames it all on the situation in Palestine, which is said to have caused a big split-up among the radicals.”

“Meantime Hugo Gellert’s decorations stare down on a dining-hall containing only movers’ litter, and warmed no longer by passionate discussions over the troubles of the universe. Thus has passed the only important congregating place for radicals in the city.”

(Sadly, the Daily Worker’s statement, on 12/21/29, “Difficulties arising out of relations with hostile business elements who have become especially antagonistic since the Palestine events have compelled the temporary closing…” could resonate eerily to today’s reader.)

From a temple of community to one of commerce, the space would later be occupied by S. Klein’s Bargain Basement annex. Today it serves up the home furnishings of Raymour & Flanigan.

Caffeine, perhaps, being the common element for harried low-paid workers over the centuries, Starbucks may have replaced the ubiquitous cafeteria as the city’s proletariat gathering spots. The company, famously anti-union (on principle, mind you), has just shuttered their one union store in the neighborhood, the massive and popular Astor Place location, which had only unionized in 2022. (The same year Trader Joe’s suddenly closed its nearby Wine Shop in the midst of labor organizing efforts.)

This leaves only the Starbucks Reserve Roastery at 9th Avenue and 15th Street for Village comrades to get a union-served Grande coffee-based beverage. (That Starbucks’ ship will shortly be helmed by the defecting CEO of Chipotle, another union-adverse employer, may soon send stewards walking the plank.)

One might envision, if, as happened 95 years ago, this city’s labor organizers were still able to bring out several thousand workers to picket during weeks of strikes, how different the environment would be for hourly workers who serve food and deliver packages. Oy vey iz mir!