How Reading Terminal’s gingerbread city came together, one cookie house at a time, in a Queens basement

Traffic jams are typical in the Reading Terminal Market, but one holiday guest star has generated more rubbernecking than usual during recent rush hours. Bouquets of onlookers have been whipping out their smartphones near the intersection of Bee Natural, the Herbiary, and Sweet T’s Bakery, capturing scenes from a sprawling gingerbread metropolis.

There’s Comet and Cupid’s Cupcakery, I Saw Three Ships Theater, Snowball Fight Club, Santa’s Checkin’ It Twice Tax Service, Rudolph’s Red-Nosed Realty, ‘Twas the Night Before Candy Store, and Three French Hens Holiday Patisserie. Dozens of two-and three-story edifices tower over hundreds of low-slung beige cookie houses populated by dozens of little sugar figurines: penguins, Santa, nutcrackers, snowmen, and more. All told, the landscape features more than 500 gingerbread houses glued together with roughly 1,000 batches of royal icing.

This is different than the Peddler’s Village gingerbread competition, whose meticulously frosted entries attract crowds to Bucks County every winter. This feels like a real, lived-in gingerbread city, and the sugar-coating reflects the handiwork of an independent contractor. The piping penmanship is a little shaky. The cinnamon-gum bricks are mortared somewhat haphazardly, as are the myriad candy roof tiles. The gingerbread walls and windows look a bit drafty.

The vast-but-ramshackle nature of this town makes sense once you learn it’s virtually all the work of one man: Jon Lovitch, a longtime New Yorker and professional chef turned full-time, self-taught gingerbread man.

Lovitch builds not one, but four of these displays every year under the auspices of his 30-year-old company, GingerBread Lane. He started in 1994 with a 14-house display at the Hyatt in Kansas City, Missouri and was hooked by the joy it gave himself and others. Lovitch gradually grew this seasonal labor of love into a livelihood; he quit cheffing in 2015. Over the years, venues in D.C., Pittsburgh, Houston, Salt Lake City, New York, and Vancouver have commissioned villages. He has set the Guinness World Record for creating the largest gingerbread village four times as a result.

In advance of his debut at the Reading Terminal, he invited The Inquirer to Queens to see firsthand how he bakes, assembles, decorates, and stores the 2,100 gingerbread houses that colonize his basement for 10 months out of the year.

Like most cookie houses, Lovitch’s starts out in the bowl of a stand mixer.

“This is KitchenAid number three,” he says as he rinses out a stainless steel bowl matte with wear. Lovitch goes through two or three mixers a year, buying them off Craigslist for deep discounts. “I’ve had three different college kids be like, ‘My mom sent me with this because she knows I like homemade chocolate chip cookies, but I’d rather just have money for dinner.’”

Lovitch approaches the baking finish line in early October, and the kitchen bears the evidence. An army of half-done sugar sculptures — partially filled Santa’s sleighs, snowmen bodies, unwritten billboards, faceless nutcrackers — occupies the counter beneath the microwave. Lovitch’s primary workspace is covered with spattered dough, bags of candy, cans of baking spray, and bottles of food dye. Plastic piping bags filled with icing of all colors overflow from another mixing bowl.

It’s the inevitable result of basing a gingerbread construction company from your home kitchen, and Lovitch — a jolly, easy-going guy — has learned to embrace the chaos. “Once you get used to stepping on royal icing crumbs, you wonder how you ever lived without it,” he likes to joke. (He deep-cleans the kitchen every December, just in time to start the cycle anew.)

Lovitch readies a fresh batch of dough. He shakes flour into the the bowl straight from the bag, then does the same with brown sugar and a mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ground ginger. He sloshes in some vegetable oil, followed by pancake syrup (a more affordable substitute for corn syrup). He chuckles when asked if he’s measuring anything out. Thirty years in, everything is old hat, done by feel.

He rolls out dough onto a greased sheet pan using a can of baking spray. “I haven’t used a rolling pin for gingerbread since Bill Clinton was president,” he says. He cuts out walls and windows, rolling up dough scraps to make windowpanes. He punches out little holes that will eventually be filled with icing, which allows Lovitch to add shutters and wreaths, not to mention bonding the cookie bases together.

“The icing outnumbers the gingerbread like eight to one. Gingerbread is really fragile.” Powdered sugar whipped with cream of tartar and egg white, on the other hand, basically forms cement — as long as it doesn’t get wet. “You could make real houses if it wasn’t for rain,” Lovitch says of royal icing.

The pan goes into the oven without a timer.

“I’ll do that exact same thing 12, 13, 1,400 times over the course of the year. I know what I’m looking for.” Or, in the case of the gingerbread, what he’s smelling for. As it bakes, it perfumes the air in the Forest Hills house, which Lovitch shares with his wife (a veterinarian), their 5-year-old daughter, and three cats.

For Lovitch, assembling a gingerbread house is a purely technical exercise. After cooling, the walls can get piped and framed up in minutes, depending on the humidity, which affects drying time. Best to wait before you decorate.

“It’s a process. You bake it, you stand them up, and then you leave them alone,” he says as he presses some Brach’s Jelly Bird Eggs onto the roof of a house baked in June. Repair work might be necessary later — requiring some icing reinforcement or a few more minutes in the oven — but with a good foundation and steady dehumidification, the houses stay solid for months.

The real magnitude of Lovitch’s work is only revealed when you descend into the basement, where gingerbread houses spring up on every surface. Baking sheets holding completed houses are pushed to one side of the steps. Completed sugar sculptures — ice cream cones, cartoon-eyed reindeer, nostalgic Santa cocoa mugs, masted ships — loom on a shelf above them.

The basement itself is a labyrinth of card tables and bookshelves crammed with candy-covered structures. Everywhere you look, there are more: on the washer, in a closet, on the sofa, perched on a cardboard box. Lovitch sorts them by the city their destined for. Besides the Reading Terminal, this year’s houses were bound for New York’s Chelsea Market, the Houston Farmers Market, and the Kansas City Market.

“I love public markets,” Lovitch says over the whine of dehumidifiers. After years of working with museums, hotels, and theme parks to display GingerBread Lane, he started pitching markets so his work could be more accessible. “It makes it free to come see it, which is wonderful.”

Venues commission Lovitch’s gingerbread cities. He bases the price on the size and complexity, nailing down contracts in January (though he’s already started baking again by that point).

At the start of the new year, Lovitch is working on sugar sculptures, which benefit from long drying times. By St. Patrick’s Day, he’ll have built many of the biggest gingerbread structures — the hotels, factories, and theaters. He makes 10 to 12 houses a month in the first part of the year, leaving them half-finished until fall. They’ll have candy-studded roofs and gum brickwork at the corners, but he holds off on the ornamentation. “It’s more about fortifying the inside.”

When August hits, Lovitch ratchets up the pace. He adds little details to the big houses: wreaths, text, candy cane railings. He makes hundreds of one-story houses, which he refers to as “filler.” By October, 15 to 20 small houses are going up a day, and another 25 to 30 are getting decorated.

Come November, it’s time to box everything up and move them out, city by city. Lovitch delivers and sets them up himself, with assistance from friends and family. He’ll spend six weeks criss-crossing the country, setting up displays and running gingerbread workshops.

This is GingerBread’s Lane first year in Philadelphia, but Lovitch and his family regularly come to the Reading Terminal. He hopes it to add it to the company’s annual repertoire — especially since they visit this time of year anyway. “Between Longwood, Winterthur, the outdoor market, [Philadelphia’s] already a pretty good Christmas-destination town,” he says.

In mid-November, Lovitch unboxed the first of four carloads without a trace of nervousness. Having made treks out West and beyond, the drive from Queens to Philly is easy. He was armed with royal icing and gumdrops. He planned to return over three nights to arrange the city on pallets and cardboard risers. The display would be there until January, after which Lovitch and the market will give houses away to interested parties. Lovitch has heard of people keeping a house as a decoration in future years, as an offering to squirrels and birds, and even as target practice.

The Terminal welcomes more than 500,000 visitors between Thanksgiving week and New Year’s, making it one of its busiest times of the year. “Everyone loves the market, but it’s nice to do something special on the holidays,” says market CEO and general manager Annie Allman of the decision to commission a gingerbread village. “We really wanted to make sure that, for families, there was something fun and free to bring them into Center City.”

They also felt simpatico with Lovitch’s kitschy style, Allman adds. “We’re not perfect. We’re a little quirky,” she says of the market. “What he’s doing just seems very homey and from a real place, so we thought it was a great fit.”

Being a gingerbread man isn’t easy, Lovitch says, but it’s the end result that makes it all worth it.

“It’s stressful. It trashes my house, it destroys my body. It’s too much work. But seeing the reaction everybody has from it year after year ... it’s a really great feeling to know you make people happy.”

GingerBread Lane will be on display daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Reading Terminal until Jan. 2.