Northeast Philadelphia is losing its last traditional Jewish deli

Northeast Philadelphia’s last traditional Jewish delicatessen will close this weekend, ending a chapter in a food culture that for decades seemed inseparable from the area itself.

Steve Stein’s Famous Deli, in Bustleton’s Grant Plaza, outlasted a food landscape once crowded with Jewish delis, bakeries, butchers, and other specialty shops. Its closing Sunday comes more than nine years after the finale of Jack’s Deli in Bell’s Corner, the Northeast’s penultimate deli. Like Stein’s, Jack’s combined a retail counter with a restaurant.

For Steve Stein, 83, the closing will end a family business whose roots stretch back to the late 1950s, when his family became involved with the Famous Deli location at 6826 Bustleton Ave. in Castor Gardens.

Famous was part of an older Philadelphia deli dynasty. Beginning in the 1920s, the Auspitz brothers launched a string of delis around the city, including the flagship at Fourth and Bainbridge Streets in Queen Village, now owned by Al Gamble.

Around 1960, Stein said, the Auspitzes sold the Bustleton Avenue Famous to Stein’s father, Mike, his brother Arnold, and his cousin Jack. The boys had run the produce concession there. Steve and Arnie, who died in 2010, later ran it side by side. Steve now runs the place with his son, Lee, now 57.

Since Stein announced the closing, customers have been stocking up on corned beef, smoked fish, rye bread, and other foods they fear they will not easily replace. Stein has cut prices as he tries to move inventory.

“Nobody’s charging $9.99 a pound for house-cured corned beef,” Lee Stein said.

On Friday, Tracey Lynn of Fox Chase ordered two pounds of corned beef while plucking garlic-perfumed sour tomatoes from a barrel, telling Stein that she planned to freeze some of the meat.

Lynn said she and her husband have been customers since 1993. She is not sure where she will shop next. “I don’t want whitefish salad from BJ’s or from Costco,” she said.

The closing is partly a retirement story. Stein said problems with his legs have made it increasingly difficult to work.

But it is also about labor costs, food prices, succession, and a neighborhood whose demographics have changed dramatically over the life of the business.

As Jewish families moved farther into the Northeast, Famous followed: first, in the mid-1970s, to Krewstown Road (where it had two locations) and, 14 years ago, to Grant Avenue. Stein, who later also had a short-lived store in Holland, Bucks County, sold the Bustleton Avenue store in the mid-1970s.

In that sense, the history of Famous tracks the movement of Jewish Philadelphia itself.

After World War II, thousands of Jewish families left older Philadelphia neighborhoods such as Strawberry Mansion, Queen Village, and Wynnefield for Oxford Circle, Castor Gardens, Rhawnhurst, and Bustleton in the rapidly developing Northeast. Others moved to Lower Merion and Cherry Hill, which developed large Jewish communities and deli cultures of their own that remain.

By 1970, demographer Ira Rosenwaike estimated, using Census data on Yiddish as a mother tongue, that more than 68,000 Jewish adults 25 and older lived in the Near and Far Northeast.

That population supported an extraordinary density of Jewish food businesses: Abe’s Appetizers, Castor Deli, R&W, Stern’s, Paul’s, Four Lads, Dave’s, Casino, the Nasherei, four Barson-Overbrook locations.

To Hasia Diner, a historian and New York University professor who specializes in American Jewish history, the significance of delis was precisely their ordinariness. They were not institutions created to preserve Jewish culture. They were where neighborhood life happened.

“On the one hand, [delis] seem so everyday,” Diner said in an interview. “They’re not great synagogues where religion was expounded, or places where great ideas were pronounced. But they were places where life was lived.”

Some were kosher and others were not. What mattered, Diner said, was that the deli offered a secular Jewish space, rooted as much in neighborhood and food as in religious observance.

By the 1980s, however, those neighborhoods were changing. In a 1987 Inquirer article, Bruce Isakoff of Paul’s Deli, on Castor Avenue near Brighton Street, said his business was doing more lunchtime trade as Jews left the neighborhood and it became a more generic deli. By then, Four Lads, on Castor Avenue at Creston Street in Oxford Circle, had stopped carrying smoked fish and pastrami. Both are long gone.

Many Jewish households moved farther north and into Bucks and Montgomery Counties. A 1996-97 Jewish Federation study found that Philadelphia accounted for 41% of the region’s population living in Jewish households, down from 54% in 1984, while Bucks County’s share had nearly doubled.

The studies used different definitions and geographic boundaries, but the direction was unmistakable: The dense Jewish population that once sustained neighborhood delis had dispersed.

The movement itself was nothing new, Diner said. American Jewish communities repeatedly established themselves in neighborhoods and moved elsewhere. What changed was the role of the old neighborhood — and of the deli within it.

“The deli was often the kind of shrine to which they went back,” she said.

The old delis offered something beyond nostalgia. In their heyday, Diner said, they were overwhelmingly Jewish spaces where customers did not have to explain themselves or worry about how they appeared to outsiders.

“These places were so rich with a kind of embeddedness, of comfort and security and, again, letting your hair down,” she said.

Population was only part of the story. Supermarkets increasingly stock foods that once sent customers to specialty counters: corned beef, pastrami, smoked fish, whitefish salad, herring, rye bread, bagels, pickles, and knishes. But not everything. Signs at Famous proclaim, “Yes, We Have Tongue!!!” Not many others do.

More important, Diner said, is what cannot be sold at a supermarket: the deli as a secular gathering place, where being Jewish required neither religious observance nor agreement about politics. “A pastrami sandwich is a pastrami sandwich,” she said.

The traditional deli model itself is expensive and labor-intensive, built around extensive preparation and a sprawling inventory. Famous still cures its corned beef and makes its own turkey, pastrami, whitefish salad, and spice beef.

Steve Stein said finding employees has become increasingly difficult. Lee Stein said prospective workers have easier options, such as driving for Uber or making deliveries for Grubhub.

The deli has about 35 employees, many part-time. Some are placed through SPIN, the Philadelphia nonprofit that supports people with intellectual, developmental, and autism spectrum disabilities.

Survival has also required adapting to the customer base, increasingly non-Jewish. Lee said he remembers when Famous carried a single canned ham, hidden behind the counter. Though few Jewish delis are kosher, pork traditionally has been another matter.

“Nobody was allowed to say the word ham,” he said.

Today, their case holds about a dozen varieties.

Rob Woloshin, 40, owner of Manny’s Deli Stop in Willow Grove, grew up going to Stein’s Famous with his father. His deli represents a leaner version of the old model: counter service, a few tables, online ordering, and delivery, with traditional deli sandwiches alongside chicken cutlets, wraps, and other contemporary offerings.

“We’ve kind of modernized, I guess, as much as the Jewish deli can be modernized,” Woloshin said.

Famous may yet have an afterlife. Lee Stein said he is talking with the landlord about a deal that could keep him in the space, under another name, in time for the Jewish High Holy Days, which begin Sept. 11. If not, he might offer catering from a synagogue kitchen.

For longtime cashier Linda DiNenno, the closing is less about corned beef than the people around the counter. She said she will miss the family atmosphere among employees and customers who have been calling to say goodbye.

“I’ve got customers calling on the phone, like, ‘Oh my God, I’m gonna miss you, Linda,’” she said.