Secret Garden
A diner for radicals and refugees shows its face again.

Photo by Chris Buck

Last April, during building renovations for a Chinese restaurant on the corner of East Broadway and Rutgers Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a ghost from the neighborhood’s past was temporarily glimpsed in the form of an architectural and social relic: the sign from the long defunct Garden Cafeteria.

A modest restaurant, opened in 1911, the Garden was part hangout, part salon, famous for its hospitality to radical political activists (Emma Goldman, Leon Trotsky, and Fidel Castro are all said to have eaten there) and also to the journalists who wrote about them. The strip where the Garden was located was a virtual Yiddish-newspaper row, in fact, with the Jewish Daily Forward based nearby on East Broadway and Der Tog, Yiddishes Tage­blatt, and the satirical weekly Der Groyser Kundes (The Big Stick) across the street.

“It was the Jews’ Automat!” recalls actor and comedian Jerry Stiller, who lived in the neighborhood as a teenager. “It had a homey feeling.” There was a steam table, he says, “with brisket, good matzoh ball soup, onion rolls, latkes, kreplach, borscht with sour cream, and schav, a sour soup from the old country made with greens”. The affordable menu—for a couple of dollars or so you could order an entrée with two sides, coffee, and dessert—also made the Garden a favorite place for cabbies and other working folks and their families. But Stiller noted, “If you were going out on a date, you didn’t want to bring her there. It wasn’t the place to sweet-talk a girl.”

Photographer Bruce Davidson, who created a series of black-and-white images around the Garden Cafeteria in the early 1970s, remembers his own experiences at the place. “I’d walk in, take a ticket, and a little bell would ring. I would wander around to find someone I wanted to photograph and ask them how the rice pudding was, just to break the ice.” Of the customers, he says, “It was really about survivors. Many of the people there were survivors of concentration camps.”

The Garden is frequently associated with Poland-born writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who immortalized it in the short story “The Cabalist of East Broadway”. Its last day of business—it closed its doors in 1983, and the site soon became a bustling dim sum joint called Wing Shoon—was captured on film in Amram Nowak’s documentary Isaac Bashevis Singer: Isaac in America.

As for the sign, its exposure caught the attention of several Jewish groups, who expressed interest in preserving it. In the end, the Eldridge Street Project, a local preservation and educational organization, stepped in to rescue the sign, reportedly paying the contractors $500 to do so. The “Garden” section of the sign will now serve as a backdrop for the project’s Garden Cafeteria Literary Series, which presents readings and discussions pertaining to topics in Judaism. In its place on the corner is now the Wing Shoon restaurant’s shiny new chrome sign. You’d never know that the corner had ever been home to anything else.

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