Publishers Noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher.
I first visited Seward Park on the Lower East Side in 2020, looking for a newspaper box that served as the single distribution point for a publication then much in demand among New York’s writing set: the Drunken Canal. On arrival, I found the newspaper box empty—and my attention drawn instead to a ten-story terra-cotta building presiding over the park. A double-height entry arch declared the tower a public building, and the word Forward emblazoned on one side appeared to claim the neighborhood as its own.
More than half a million people lived on New York’s Lower East Side in 1910 (over five times its current population), of whom about 400,000 were Yiddish-speaking Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe, many working in the sweatshops of New York’s garment industry. In 1890 Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives, with photos of the packed, windowless tenements that made such an extraordinary population density possible. That same year, seeking to organize these masses into America’s growing socialist and labor movements, members of the socialist party started a Yiddish weekly, Di Arbeter Tsaytung. Abraham Cahan, a Jewish socialist who had fled repression in czarist Russia, joined as a writer and then rose to be its editor. After the Socialist Labor Party moved to centralize control of the Tsaytung, Cahan and a cohort of fellow dissenters quit and joined the newly established Social Democratic Party, led by Eugene Debs. In 1897 they established the Jewish Daily Forward.
Almost immediately falling out with a cofounder, Cahan went to work for the Republican-leaning Commercial Advertiser. Working with its editor, Cahan learned how to operate a commercially successful paper and developed a new way of covering news from the tenements. Unlike Riis, who treated his subjects as objects of pity and emphasized their squalid surroundings, Cahan focused on the energy and dignity of its members, treating the tribulations and accomplishments of their days as stories worth covering. Whereas Riis looked to shock the middle and upper classes into passing reforms, Cahan sought to empower the tenement population so they could determine their own fate.
In 1901, Cahan took full control of the Forward and put his new approach and skills to work. Its circulation grew rapidly, hitting 120,000 by 1912 and riding as high as 275,000 in the early 1930s. Cahan would be its editor until 1946. In 1909, he commissioned that impressive terra-cotta tower. According to historian Mike Wallace, it was the first and possibly only New York skyscraper built by socialists. It housed the newspaper’s offices and, in its basement, a phalanx of presses. It also acted as a social condenser for New York’s Jewish socialist community, leasing office space to unions and mutual aid organizations and hosting rallies and speeches in its auditorium.
The Forward was a pillar of its community, helping garment workers organize for better labor conditions. That said, things did not always go smoothly. In 1912 an ally, the United Brotherhood of Tailors (UBT), staged its first major strike—more than 100,000 tailors walked out. As the strike dragged on and resources ran low, the parent union, the United Garment Workers (UGW), with the help of Cahan and AFL leader Samuel Gompers, went behind the UBT’s back to broker a compromise with the tailors’ employers. Enraged, 15,000 UBT members marched on the tower, repudiating the deal and staying on strike until they achieved more of their demands.
As the Forward’s community learned English and assimilated into American society, leaving the sweatshops of lower Manhattan and the Yiddish language behind, its circulation shrank. Today, it survives as an online-only nonprofit. The Forward Building, in the meantime, has moved in step with its neighborhood’s people. In 1974, as Chinese immigrants arrived in Manhattan and the formerly Jewish enclave became Chinatown, the paper sold the building to a Chinese American family, who rented the auditorium at the base to the Ling Liang Church. In the 1990s, celebrities and the rich began to take a liking to Chinatown, and in 2004 a new developer converted the whole building into luxury condominiums. The building’s current service to the upper classes appears to have made the interior less glamorous: gray drywall cuts up the once-spacious double-height lobby. The developers chopped up it and other communal spaces, such as the auditorium, to create more units. When I visited the other day, the doorman, Vince, told me that the stairs to the podium up to which labor leaders once climbed to address the masses are still visible—in the corner of somebody’s condo.
Vince also shared with a quick pride that the busts of, as he called them, “the founding fathers” are on the front of the building: “Marx, Engels, and I cannot remember the others.” (One of them is Ferdinand Lassalle, the Jewish founder of Germany’s labor movement, and, indeed, it appears no one is quite sure who the fourth one is.) The politics of Abe Cahan may yet have traction in his old neighborhood.