(lively traditional music) ♪ (Anthony) We have the best matzo in the world right here.

New York City.

It's all coming out of right here.

You won't find that nowhere in the world.

♪ The water we use is New York City water, which is the best water in the world.

You want Jersey water?

Fine.

You buy matzos from Jersey.

That's on you.

We have quality.

♪ We have tourists that come from all over the world to the Lower East Side just to get a glimpse of how we make these matzos.

It's not a thing you just mix and throw into the oven.

Everything is sorted by hand, by taste, and by feel.

You have to hold it in your hand, you have to feel the moisture in it.

These guys have been here for years doing this.

You know, it's like an artist.

You're not going to paint a picture that has no meaning, and that's how we make matzo here.

For us it's like art.

Forget about it.

The best job in the world.

♪ (soft traditional music) ♪ (Aron) A little cousin of mine, I was her guest speaker for like, you know, "What does my dad do for a day?"

Well, I was her cousin.

Every dad was either a lawyer or a doctor, and I was the only matzo baker, so I was--I was different.

I don't know if I was as big a hit as the fireman, but I was maybe a close second.

I don't think about it every day, you know, to me it's second nature, I've been here since I was a little kid.

But it's unique, you know, we're kind of like taking a step back in time when you walk into the factory, we're kind of in a time warp here.

I mean, no one in their right mind in this day and age would design a factory in New York City on the Lower East Side with five floors, no loading dock, and the cost of doing business in New York, and all the problems that go along with it.

If you had to start it from scratch, you would put it in a big building we have under one roof out in Jersey somewhere.

But this is our foothold, this is where my grandfather was, my great-grandfather was.

And it's just a part of the culture of the Lower East Side.

(old-timey music) (announcer) Part of New York's Lower East Side getting ready for the feast of Passover, celebrating the deliverance of the Israelites from the Egyptians.

This is also the period when leavened bread is prohibited and Orthodox Jews must eat matzos.

They eat the matzos to commemorate the flight from Egypt, when they traveled so fast through the desert they couldn't wait to bake bread, just mixing flour and water and letting the sun bake it.

(machine whirring) (Alan) There's a certain enjoyment to this business.

There's a psychic income that you just don't get elsewhere.

It's a mitzvah to make matzos for Passover.

We serve as a connection to the history of the Jewish people in the United States, and we're one of those last connections that modern Jews have to their ancestors coming over here from Europe.

(Rabbi Kirshner) Okay, this machine is from 1939.

The one upstairs is from 1941.

(Elissa) I've done a number of tours of the Lower East Side, and I see places like Streit's as having a lot of challenges, both today and in the future, but I also see them as a great resource for people who need to be able to connect to a past to construct their own futures.

This neighborhood represents the origin of the vast majority of Jews who came from Eastern Europe.

By 1911, it had a population density that rivaled Calcutta's, the average number of people per room, and we're talking about tenement rooms, was nine.

This neighborhood was incredibly overcrowded.

Sanitary conditions were bad.

You had tenements which had very little fresh air.

But what you did have going for it was an enormous cultural explosion in terms of intellectual life, religious life, everything else.

It's Jews coming together from all over the world, literally.

At the same time, this neighborhood has now, since World War II, been host to puertorriqueños, people from the Dominican Republic, people from Fujian Province, and all sorts of other places.

It remained an immigrant destination still through the '90s.

Think of the jobs, think about the rise of unionization in this neighborhood.

This neighborhood represented every single possibility because you had that dense industrialization, which is what allowed immigrants to get jobs, that immigration and tradition all coming together and forming this pastiche that we call modernity in America.

(Alan) My great-grandfather, Aron Streit, came from Austria at the turn of the 1900s.

He had matzo baking experience in Austria.

And when he came to the United States, he moved to the Lower East Side, which is where most of the Jews were living at the time.

He started a hand bakery on Pitt Street with a Rabbi Weinberger around 1915.

And then in 1925, he and his son Irving, his eldest son, my grandfather, opened up the modern machine bakery here, which is where we still stand.

And when Irving's younger brother, Jack, got older, he joined Irving, and the two of them basically ran the matzo business in the 20th century.

They were active, you know, during the war.

I've heard stories from other relatives about them shipping matzo over to people who couldn't get it and also supplying boxes to people who were putting bullets in the boxes to ship over for the resistance movement during World War II.

They were also involved helping other Jews in the neighborhood start up their own businesses, you know, involved in the community quite a bit.

And I'm proud and I feel a bit of obligation to continue the tradition with the family.

We make donations of product to the temples.

We're fulfilling a role, you know, that goes back to biblical times.

(Aron) People call up and say, you know, "What's your recipe?"

I said, "It's in the Bible.

It's flour and water, unleavened bread."

And we're part of people's family and tradition, you know.

We have a little store on the corner.

And people will come down here not because they're getting a better deal, not--they just want to have generations of family coming down here.

We are now the fourth and fifth generation here, me being the fourth generation, Aaron Gross being the fifth generation.

(Aaron) Being part of the Streit's family and how the Streit's family's still overseeing the production and the business, I think, is huge.

My two cousins that I run the business with now, they're my cousins first, business partners second.

Not to mention all the men that we have here.

The workers here are family as well.

We have guys that have been here 30 plus, 40 years.

We have fathers and sons.

We have the best staff that any business could hope to have and we owe our livelihood to them.

(Anthony) My name is Anthony Zapata, and I've been working here at this matzo factory for the past 30 years.

Put two of my kids through college.

I remember that day I was walking down the block, my mother had just finished telling me that morning, "You need to get yourself a job."

And as I was passing through here, the sooner I met Mr. Jack.

(Aron) Yeah, my grandfather, Jack, was the last of the Damon Runyon characters.

He was always in the factory playing with the oven, always tweaking it, kibitzing with the guys.

If he didn't know their name, it was, "Hey, fella."

I guess he needed help that day because he stopped me, he said, "Hey, hey, hey, hey, Italian kid, Italian kid.

You want a job in here?

You want a job?"

I said, "Sure."

Those are the best words I ever heard in the world.

I'll never forget him, I'll never forget him.

(Aron) Zapata's a unique guy.

I really like him.

My favorite Anthony Zapata story was, once in a while the chain in the oven will break and it will start to smolder, smoke will start billowing out and people think that the factory's on fire.

And all of a sudden, everyone's running out of the building, calling the fire department, and Anthony ran in with a little tiny garden hose about three-quarters of an inch thick to put this fire out.

Everyone's running out of the building and he's running in.

He was confident he was gonna put this fire out with his little garden hose.

And I always tell him, I said, "You know what, Anthony?

After that, you always have a job here."

(Anthony) You're not gonna find a job like this nowhere in the world.

You come here, you work.

After years, it's like you're at home, you know?

That's what it's become, our home.

(Rabbi Kirshner) It's a family here.

What we're doing there is a tradition here.

The old ovens, the New York City water.

You know, the jobs, there's 60 people working here.

The jobs that these people have, if we left and modernized, they would lose, you know, their parnasa, they would lose their livelihoods, so the family is dedicated to staying here as long as they can.

(Aron) I don't--have you met Michael?

Michael's been here-- how long you been here?

-24.

-24 years Michael's been here.

Gauthier, how long you been here?

How many years you work here?

-Uh, 30 years.

-30 years.

-Yeah, 30 years.

-Actually, his dad used to work here.

(Alan) I mean, we could make significantly more money in a modern factory in New Jersey, but I think, especially in this economy, it's a mitzvah to support people and to keep production here in the United States, to keep it here in New York City.

There's a tie to history that you don't get elsewhere.

(Renee) When I was young and I came here, it was a very exciting thing for me.

The people came all up and down Essex Street, Delancey Street.

I think every block down here had a kosher delicatessen.

The Jewish people looked upon matzo as being a very important part of their heritage, especially those that came from Europe, and many of those people would come into our store and talk to us, and they were just so grateful to be able to have come to America.

They had freedom.

The heart and soul of the Jewish people was right here on the Lower East Side.

(energetic music) ♪ (female vocalist) ♪ What I'm searching for ♪ ♪ To tell it straight, I'm trying to build a wall ♪ ♪ (Anthony) Being raised in the neighborhood, I've seen a lot of the changes and stuff.

People that are moving in that are single, fresh out of college or something, you know?

Seen a lot of old businesses leave and a lot of new ones come in.

Mostly bars that are opening up now, restaurants and stuff like that.

There's still a few of us out there, we're surviving.

We're surviving, but the changes in the neighborhood have been dramatic.

(female vocalist) ♪ I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up ♪ ♪ ♪ If I could stand up mean for the things that I believe ♪ ♪ (Aron) We feel like we're the last of the Mohicans that are still left down here.

(Aaron) We started here basically to service the Lower East Side.

The month before Passover, there used to be lines around the block here.

As the neighborhood's changed over the years, our model has changed and our concentration is really just broader distribution.

We still manufacture here, we still have a retail store here, but it's a lot different than, you know, when we started here basically just to feed the neighborhood.

♪ -How are you?

-Fine, long time no see.

-How are the kids?

-Ach!

-Just so you know... -The ba--the baby had one child.

(Jerry) The baby's coming into the business.

(Renee) Wonderful, that's how many years-- -Next generation is-- -Right, that's beautiful.

(Jerry) So we're gonna have 4, they'll be the 4th generation.

-Right.

-Oh, my God, I had that radio as a kid.

-What?

-That was my clock radio that used to wake me up every day for school.

(Renee) Economy Candy from down on Rivington Street, their family was in business when I was a little girl.

I know they're still there, I saw them, but I can't tell you anybody else.

Very slowly, this store closed up, this one closed up.

It was a very small Jewish world here then.

Not now.

(Elissa) People viewed the Lower East Side as an ethnic hub, meaning that their families had grown up in it.

They came back to it for familial and social and religious reasons, and also to buy.

They could be buying religious objects, they could be buying matzo, they could be buying a pocketbook.

It helped those neighborhoods stay as ethnic Jewish hubs.

And what you see today is these small ethnic enclaves in places like the Lower East Side are under enormous real estate pressure because the gentrification and that tension between whether it is immigrant and what you do in terms of the economic diversity is--it's in the air.

(Anthony) A lot of the people I grew up with left.

You know, they couldn't afford to pay the rent.

The people that are moving in now, they want what we have.

We're right next to the water, we're close to all the good stuff, all the trains.

So, you know, now the property's being brought up and rent is going up.

The place looks a lot nicer, but it's very costly.

I don't know if it's for the better or for the worse.

You know, maybe another 10 years'll tell.

If I'm still down here, then you know it was for the better.

If I'm not down here, then it was for the worse, you know?

That's the bottom line.

(Aaron) Everything that's matzo or matzo-derivative is made here on Rivington Street.

So whether it's our egg matzo or our pink box, our whole wheat, spelt, organic, the matzo meal, the cake meal, the farfel, that's all made here.

(Aron) No one really designs a matzo machine anymore, a matzo packing machine.

We've reworked a lot of the machinery, but the actual basis of the machines are the same from when my great-grandfather was around, so we have to get a lot of parts handmade.

(Angelo) This is a gearbox on all our mixing machines.

Get a hammer please.

I was born in Italy and came to the United States when I was 11 years old.

My father was a mason, my mom was a housekeeper.

They came for the American dream.

My father started working on the big high risers.

From there, he had his own business, a general contractor, he started doing that type of work.

That's what I learned.

Okay, there's-- there's your bolt, I'll hold it for you.

(Sergio) Yeah, Angelo making (unintelligible) in this part.

(Angelo) This piece was--I might have fired it instead of-- (Sergio) Before, we change this piece like maybe 10 time a day.

(Angelo) Now instead it's only once in a while.

Before, I was working in Brooklyn in a factory which we made frozen food.

It was sold out to another big company, it went upstate, and that's when I met Mr. Yagoda and became good friends, came in here and took over the maintenance shop, and been here since then, for 10 years.

It is very nice because you work directly in contact with the owners.

Most of them have worked on the lines and they do understand what we're working with.

We have a building that's a hundred years old, so it's not easy.

(Aron) The setup of the factory is four old converted tenement buildings.

People come in here now and they're still amazed at the thought that went into designing the factory from the get-go, how the matzo on the first floor has to go to the second floor, so instead of moving it around by pallets or anything, we have this basket system that goes around and it serves two purposes.

It moves the matzo and it also cools it.

During Passover, to make sure that everything is washed according to Rabbi Soloveichik and the Kof-K, our two main kashruth agencies that we're under, they have six mashgiachs employed during each shift, and we have Rabbi Kirshner here as well.

-Beautiful mix.

-And they make sure that, you know, everything is made according to Rabbinical supervision.

(Rabbi Senter) Generally, when you make production for kosher, if the equipment and the process and ingredients are all kosher, you're gonna end up with a kosher product.

Comes Passover matzo production, and all of a sudden we've got this added component of time that if you mix flour and water together, you've got 18 minutes to get that the through the system, otherwise that dough will become chametz and not kosher for Passover.

If there's any break in production for more than 10 minutes, we have to start over again.

It's like starting up at the beginning of the day.

(traditional music) ♪ (Alan) Typical baking day starts around 5:00 here at the factory.

♪ Nowadays when you come in that early, beautiful 20-something people are coming out of the after-hours bar across the street.

♪ -Morning, Angelo.

-Morning.

(Alan) When the flour comes in, it is blown upstairs to the fifth floor, where we have the flour dumping station.

It then travels back down to the second floor, where the flour and water are mixed and then the dough is dumped down the chute.

(Aaron) We're gonna overlap the dough four times one direction, four times the other.

Gets sent through all these rollers, gets thinner and thinner and thinner.

Then it's sending it right through the oven.

My grandmother is Muriel Streit.

She married Aaron Gross, who I'm named for.

Coincidentally, Aaron had five brothers, and one of the brothers married Natalie Manischewitz and the other was married to a Horowitz girl from Horowitz Margareten.

So on that side of the family, there were three of the four major matzo producers at the time.

Passover Seders, of course, were always crazy.

Fight over which matzo was, you know, the headliner.

This was, what, the '50s?

Manischewitz is now owned by a-- I think a private equity group.

They bought the rights to the Horowitz name, to the Goodman's name.

So we're really the last ones that are actually still doing it here.

You have Sergio working over here on the sheeter.

-How many years?

-20.

(Aaron) 20?

Ah, when I first started here, I started in '98, '97, '98 working the night shift.

And I worked with Sergio up in the mixing room.

-We had a good time.

-We had a very good time, very good time.

I grew up down in Maryland outside of D.C., but I had family up here, my grandmother lived in Manhattan, so I spent a lot of time as a kid coming up and running around the halls of the factory with my great-grandfather and my grandmother.

But the biggest thing when I first started working up here, my father, I got to spend a lot of time with my father, which was nice.

And we worked close together.

He was always on the sales side, so that's why I came in and started doing sales.

He passed away in '05, so we got to work together for a good five years.

It was a very special time to be able to have done that together.

(Aron) This is our first floor matzo oven.

It's 72 feet long.

It used to bake for like a minute and 20 seconds.

Now it's a minute and 45.

It got a little older, I guess.

My grandfather, Jack, the first thing he would do, he would get out of the car when he got to work, he would walk right to the oven.

Not the office, not anything, and go right to touching the matzo.

He'd handle the matzo as it was coming out of the oven, where everyone's wearing gloves.

I don't know if he had calluses on his fingers or blisters after all those years.

(Jack) I see the top of the matzo's perfect, the bottom is all right too.

Oops, not as good as the front.

Take off that matzo there.

(Aron) Even in his 80s, he would walk around the factory causing all kinds of havoc and having a great time.

(Jack) I'm making adjustments because this side of the matzo should be a little bit browner.

(Aron) There's this wrench that's like a lead pipe with a wrench soldered into it, so my grandfather could, you know, reach across.

He would just like lean over into everything.

And they were always scared, so they made this like long wrench and Michael still has that wrench today.

(employee) Mr. Jack.

He was a very, really good guy.

-Mr. Jack.

-It was always, "Mr. Jack, Mr. Jack, Mr.

Jack."

And some of them knew me when I was a little kid, so at first we had a little learning curve of, you know, that I was in charge now.

And we got past that though, we get along really well.

I'm not Mr. Aron though, I'm just Aron.

(Anthony) Jack Streit, you know, he was the best guy in the world.

Working for him, he made you feel so close to him.

If anything was coming at him, you'll jump in front of it.

That's how he made you feel like, you know, like you're a brother, you know, like you was a part of his family, that's how he made you feel.

(Aron) My grandfather got sick in the late '80s, early '90s, and he told me to just come in and see if I like it and all that.

And I guess I'm still here on a trial basis 23 years later.

I sit at my grandfather's desk and I don't even take-- anything on top of the desk is mine.

All the stuff in the desk is still my grandfather's, and I've been sitting at the desk since 1998, so maybe one day I will really take credit and own the desk myself, but right now it's still my grandfather's, and that's why I have my stuff on top of the desk.

This staircase is my favorite thing.

It's tilted, it's everything, but it's the sturdiest staircase in New York City.

It's kind of like our Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Now we're gonna go to the third floor oven, which is the--basically the mirror image of our first floor oven.

So now Ramone here, he picks-- he picks the matzo out.

Same system, 15 sheet for Passover.

He then breaks it over here, it goes--now instead of going up, it's gonna go down to the second floor.

So all the matzo meets on the second floor for packaging.

(Alan) The two lines of matzo come down here, where the men take it off the baskets and put it on this conveyer belt.

There's an arm that senses when there's matzo in one of the bins.

The matzo is pushed into the box, and the box is glued.

Growing up, being my grandfather and my father was my dream.

I wanted to work in the family business.

But my grandfather did not want me in the business.

You know, Grandpa didn't go to college.

Worked in the factory, slept in the factory quite a bit.

We'd come home all dirty with flour dust.

And he wanted his children and grandchildren to have a better life.

So I became a lawyer and did that for 25 years.

And I remember we were at Grossingers and I had gotten a letter from the Onondaga County District Attorney.

And it was addressed to the Honorable Alan Adler, Assistant Attorney General.

And I gave the envelope to my grandfather and he started crying.

You know, that was his American dream.

He's probably rolling in his grave that I gave that up and I'm sitting at his desk doing what he did, but my grandfather sat here, my father worked outside in the front office.

And this is just what I always wanted.

And I'm just thrilled my life worked out as well as it did that I had two careers, one as a trial lawyer and one as a matzo baker.

When the individual boxes are wrapped, they come out this end of the wrapper, travel on conveyer belt to where they're overwrapped into the traditional five-pound boxes.

After the matzo is put into the corrugated cases, the cases are stacked, travel down the elevator to the first floor, and are loaded onto our truck, which moves them from our Manhattan factory to our New Jersey warehouse.

And that is how matzo is made.

(traditional music) ♪ (Elissa) Places like Streit's have to invoke nostalgia in people, since that's what the building speaks to.

The olfactory, the food, the alimentary, all these things go together.

This--we're not outside of our bodies, right?

Our memories connect to food and to smell and to the sensory in every sense.

How could I not see the 19th century in a place like this?

♪ But I could tell you the fact that the Streit's families have managed to survive on Suffolk Street is nothing other than extraordinary.

Rivington itself has not been industrial for a good, good century.

♪ The chain is not steady, it moves from side to side.

(Alan) Been having some problems with the upstairs oven first.

Chain's moving around a lot.

Tried to find guys to work on it.

He basically said you can't just keep repairing it, you really gotta rebuild the whole thing.

How often do you use both ovens in the winter?

(Alan) All the time, we're running-- we're running both ovens year-round.

As you remember, at our competitor's plant, they had, you know, a much more efficient system.

(Angelo) I'm the type of guy that when I see that something is not working properly, I will try to think of a way of making it work better and more efficient.

We would love to put in a new oven and do twice as much, but you need space.

We don't have the height, we don't have the width, we don't have the length.

(Alan) There are definite issues trying to operate out of old tenement buildings.

-We don't have a loading dock.

-I mean, outside, we put up cones, so hopefully-- but it's really not our loading zone.

Anyone can park there.

We just put up cones to deter people.

And if you ever noticed our street, it's very narrow.

So when a 53-foot trailer wants to come down, he sometimes has to wait an hour until someone moves a car or they take out people's side view mirrors on the way down.

(Alan) I mean, I've seen three or four guys trying to move matzo around in and out of an elevator, where with a modern factory it's in one end, out the other.

(Aron) It's like chutes and ladders in the building.

You have more employees than you would actually use if you had a one-story building in an industrial area.

It could be a lot more efficient building a new factory anywhere, anywhere other than Manhattan.

It does cost us a lot more to manufacture here.

So the cost of our product sometimes may be higher than, say, something coming in from overseas.

I think that's pretty much, you know, what's going on in manufacturing all throughout the United States.

Overseas competition is coming in cheap.

It's hard to compete sometimes when you're a union shop and you still manufacture in a very old-fashioned way.

(Aron) If you look in tapes from the '40s and the '50s and maybe even in the '60s and part of the '70s, we used to have such a big run around Passover time that we used to open up our shipping room.

That would become a makeshift store.

And it would be packed.

I'd come with my mom, and by 7:00 or 8:00, there was a line around the corner, it would go all day.

And we don't have anything like that today.

(Alan) There are more people coming into the neighborhood, but most of them are looking for, you know, the Sunday brunch with unlimited Bloody Marys.

If I opened up a vodka bar next door, I'd do very well.

(Elissa) Nostalgia, in some ways, can be a good thing as a connection.

It brings people into the neighborhood,.

But nostalgia may not pay the bills because a lot of people who want to see things or get that smell of the fresh baking matzo or maybe get a slice of Moonstrips being handed to them by a worker there, it doesn't necessarily connect to how they may buy things today.

People years ago came to Streit's, to that retail shop, and bought everything for Passover there.

And that has shifted.

(Alan) When it was Irving and Jack, it was two people who decided, you know, "This is how I'm gonna make my living until they plant me in the ground."

They actually had the opportunity to buy a vacant lot behind us, which is now housing, which would have, you know, given us room to expand, to modernize equipment, which we don't have here.

But I guess they were happy with, you know, what they had.

Irving and Jack made a nice living, supported the family and supported families of employees, and they were comfortable with what they had.

But the business has changed from that kind of direct sale retail bakery to a national and internationally distributed wholesale bakery.

If you ask me what my dream would be, it would be to keep this place running just as it is for the next 30 years.

But from a business perspective, we are part of a dying breed in the United States.

(Aron) I feel blessed to be here, I feel blessed to sit in this seat.

It's great working with my family.

It's something you probably could never, you know, create again.

But as the family gets bigger, if the company doesn't grow at the same exponential rate as the family, then at one point you're gonna have to make a decision.

(Aaron) The five-pound pink box is our number one item.

We have egg matzo, we have all these different things, but you're gonna use that white, plain matzo for your Seder.

One of our biggest challenges is that for Passover, retailers use that bundle as a loss leader to entice the kosher consumer.

So, similar to Thanksgiving where, say, you buy $50 of anything in the store, you'll get a Thanksgiving turkey for free, they've done the same thing with Passover matzo.

If they're gonna give away something for free, they want to give away the cheapest thing they can possibly get, and good, bad, or indifferent, we can't manufacture for the same price as many of our competition overseas can.

It's tough for a retailer to justify buying something, you know, say, for $10 a bundle when they give it away for free if they can, in turn, buy it for five.

(Alan) When I was a kid, the matzo industry was four American companies situated in the greater New York area.

They were all family owned and you identified with one or the other and that's what your family bought.

And there was a tradition to that.

The managers of the supermarkets would order what they wanted.

So my father, and I would accompany him, we'd go to the local Waldbaum's, meet with the manager, and they'd schmooze and, you know, he'd order some matzo.

(Aron) That has totally changed with consolidation in the industry.

Supermarkets have merged and everything's corporate now.

(Aaron) You know, we're in a very corporate environment with most of our distribution network.

Our biggest challenge is to first convince, you know, the distributer, then the retailer that, hey, there is a difference, that all these matzos are not the same.

Passover is a tradition-based holiday that, you know, we're the only company around that if someone wants to have on their Seder table the same matzo they had in 1950 on their grandmother's table, we can give that to 'em.

We really, as a family, as a management team, need to figure out a way to build this brand by being here in order to--really, to justify being here.

(Anthony) If anything ever happened to this place, I don't know what I'd do with myself.

It was a lot easier to find a job back in the '80s.

Back then, you know, you could walk into a grocery store and the guy would need help.

He's willing to give you $50 for the day.

Not the same anymore, it's just not the same.

Like all over the country it's changing, things are changing.

They're harder.

Now everything is through the internet.

You need a resume.

You know?

How is somebody like me gonna get a job through a computer?

When I go to work every day, it's a safe haven.

Put a lot of sweat and blood into this place, and it's for keeps.

It's really for keeps.

We're doing a heck of a job to try to hang in there, you know?

We may own the buildings or whatever, but we still have to pay for the stuff we use.

You know, we get a lot of breakdowns due to the old machines, parts are hard to find.

Right now we're in the balance.

(Aron) Not a lot of businesses can survive like this.

You know, this is my 24th Passover coming up at Streit's, and every year it just gets more and more difficult to stay here.

And, you know, economics and prices change, and the big picture, if you turn on CNBC, everybody's consolidating, industries are consolidating.

People are losing jobs.

And things flash across, you know, 5,000 layoffs, 10,000 layoffs.

Cutbacks, cutbacks.

It's hard to look that person in the face and say, "Hey, don't come to work Monday, I don't have a spot for you."

And you go home and, you know, you feed your family, and knowing that that guy's going home and worrying about how he's gonna feed his family.

Kind of makes you think about it at night.

Believe me, if we ever have to close the doors and turn that key for the last time and give that key to the new owner, it's gonna be a sad day for me.

(Aaron) When the real estate market was going crazy, I guess, and it was '07, '08, every single day a prospective buyer would walk by and throw out crazy numbers.

So we owed it to our shareholders at least to discuss it.

(Alan) It's a family business and we really rule by consensus.

I can't remember the last time we didn't agree unanimously on any major issue.

My older cousin, Mel, an engineer, and myself, were pushing for a plan to build a new modern factory.

Other people were hesitant.

I was a proponent for staying, I pushed to stay.

It was a tough decision because if you look at it just on paper, you run the numbers, it's a no-brainer.

But when you delve into all the other aspects of our business and what sets us apart, it's not that simple.

To have something like Streit's and have something so iconic, part of the Lower East Side and Jewish culture, I think, is very special and it's a gift.

And the fact that we're still here and that we're still family-owned, family-operated, I think really sets us apart.

We're not just a marketing company, we're actually matzo bakers.

This is what we know, this is what we do.

So I'd say the biggest con was, "Can we reproduce this matzo wherever we move?"

And I had my doubts that we could do it in another facility.

(Alan) As the production guy, I, of course, am most interested in a modern factory that produces matzo reliably, uniformly, with limited breakdowns.

And you can't do that here.

I half-joke that our matzos are like snowflakes, no two are the same.

But there's a question of whether you could reproduce the same flavor elsewhere.

Even I, who was pushing for a new factory, realized the risks.

I don't know how many of our lifetime employees would be following us to a modern factory in New Jersey or Long Island, but I--I jumped on my cousin's bandwagon to move, and at that point it looked like we had a consensus to move.

We had listed the buildings here with a realtor, and we actually had what would have been the largest per-square-foot price on the Lower East Side.

(Anthony) You know, they've sold everything except the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, and, you know, maybe that's next.

Maybe they're gonna sell that off and we'll come to the realization one day that they have condo buildings on top of the Brooklyn Bridge.

I mean, anything is possible today.

(Alan) I think of my grandfather, I think of my father, I think of my childhood.

And I think about the people we employ.

I know when I left the state as a lawyer, I had an excellent resume, but I was 50 years old.

Hard to get a job, even with, you know, outstanding credentials.

So where are these people gonna go for work?

I don't want to be the guy to say, you know, "You're unemployed," you know, "Goodbye."

You know, there--there's more than just, you know, making a bigger profit.

(unintelligible) And when the contract and a million dollar check for the deposit was sitting on this desk, we said, "Thank you very much, the building's no longer for sale, we're staying."

(Elissa) You know, whether you call it mom and pop shops or smaller businesses, getting people to feel comfortable in terms of staying in place is critical, because staying in place is really the battle about belonging and diversity.

Once that diversity is gone, it becomes homogenous, it becomes just another franchise.

It becomes another superstore.

We see new buildings going up, old buildings going down.

We see communities that don't know if they still belong.

And that sense of belonging is extremely important.

Losing a sense of belonging, it disassociates you from everything.

(soft music) ♪ (Anthony) Do I think there's gonna be opportunities rising in another direction?

♪ No.

♪ No.

I'll give you a simple answer, no.

♪ It's do or die.

That's what the Lower East Side's about now.

You know, it's all about money now.

I don't recommend that people come to New York to look for a dream.

There is no dream here, there's only reality.

It's too late to go back now.

It's way too late to go back.

♪ (Aron) I don't do a very good job of preserving things, but they say this is a picture from my great-grandfather, Aaron Streit's, funeral, how it was so well-attended, and--that's what they say, and how he--they lined up on the block where he lived, all these people.

This drawer has... ...somebody's teeth.

I don't know whose teeth they are, but--and a few dollars, but I'm scared to touch the few dollars because I think-- I don't want to get jinxed or anything like that, so I never--I never touch the money that's in here.

Here is--I should really do something better with this.

This is my great-grandmother's passport into America.

And, as you can see, they used to just give a description, like, "Forehead low, eyes broad, nose broad, face oval."

And that she came from Austria, "Now Poland," it says.

I have to do a better job preserving that, but the--if you go out here now, these two guys are still picking.

This is Valar when he was a lot younger.

He's still here.

And Negron, who's right next to him still today.

He looked like a little kid there.

Oh, look, here's my Grandpa, Jack, and his-- and the workers surrounding him.

Here's a picture of somebody that painted their ceiling with a Streit matzo box.

I didn't have the heart to tell 'em we changed the logo, but I thought it was actually pretty cool how they painted their ceiling.

The ledgers from 1950.

1949.

Pretty cool.

(Elissa) When I take people to Streit's, I strongly encourage them to think through what it means for a family to stay in the neighborhood and make that commitment, and what it means to the community to have that commitment.

But it's--it's their choice, it's Aron's family, it's his business, and now his desk.

And that's--that's a very-- that's a real dilemma.

(Anthony) I started here when I was 20 years old.

I'm now 50 years old.

I feel very close to the family.

I've attended all their funerals, a couple of weddings, and, you know, and I know how it is, how it was.

And probably have a feeling of what it's gonna become.

We know that times are hard and other factories are shutting down.

They're coming back with machinery that's maybe three or four times as fast as ours.

But it's one thing you don't have is the quality.

When I first came here, I was like, "Why are these guys so picky about this matzo stuff," you know, and I used to say to myself, "Wow, this guy, what the hell is he making a big deal out of this little thing in the matzo for," you know?

And I was like, "I don't see the big deal in that."

And after a while, you begin to see why this man was arguing about a little piece-- a burnt piece on the corner that you couldn't even see with a microscope, why he was fussing about it.

And it's because I was being trained by someone who's been here for so many years.

He was picky about quality, quality, and that's what he instilled in all of us.

And no one can ever take that away from us.

We're matzo makers, that's what we do.

(traditional music) ♪ (Elissa) It's a loss.

It's what it evoked.

It was the taste.

But the sense of persistence and continuity, and that it was one of those few things that was still there.

By the time they actually made their announcement, people knew that the ovens were getting harder to maintain and that they're going up against both very big manufacturers and a conglomerate, and they understood that the family was between a rock and a hard place.

What was very clear to me is that there was no criticism of the family.

People knew what was involved, which is they had really tried very hard under difficult circumstances, and what most people wanted was the city to intervene and offer them some incentives to stay because of the workers and because of the importance of Streit's in anchoring the last of the Lower East Side's manufacturing as well as part of its Jewish identity.

New Yorkers want to have a sense of belonging to place.

Streit's was part of that.

Having said that, the most important thing is they decided to keep on with the brand and the manufacturer.

(Aron) It was a hard decision to move, you know, and that's-- it was a lot of history, and it was sleepless nights worrying if I made the right decision or, you know...

I'm okay with the decision we made to say, "We can't make it anymore on Rivington Street."

You know, we dug our heels in and bought a building and now we're gonna build a factory.

It's exciting to think about once it's up and running, but it was probably my hardest decision, you know, I ever had to-- ever had to make.

(Aaron) You know, leading up to the sale of the Rivington Street factory, we had a couple choices, one of which was just to sell the building and sell the name and sell the whole company.

One was sell the factory and then just be a private label company.

And then the third option was to basically sell Rivington Street and replicate that Rivington Street facility on a larger scale.

For me, the only choice was to build a new facility, you know, and I think these are the tough decisions we had to make in order to keep it rolling for another 90 years, another 5 generations.

We're basically replicating everything we had on Rivington Street, so the ratios of flour and water have to be exactly what we were doing.

Our mix times I want to be exactly what we were doing.

Our lamination of the dough, I want it to be the same thickness and the same amount of laminations.

And then the oven profile we're matching to a T. We went to five different oven manufacturers.

So we finally made a decision and we found some old pictures of our first day of production on Rivington Street.

And as it turns out, they're the same manufacturer that made the oven on Rivington Street.

So I'm confident through all that research that we're gonna be able to replicate it.

We're gonna be taking our distribution center, which was always in Moonachie, New Jersey, and we're moving it up as well.

So I moved--a lot of the New York guys are actually working in that facility, so Sergio, Negron, José, Michael Abramov, they're all already in Moonachie, they're already working with us there.

If they want a job, they have a job when the new facility is up and running.

I know a lot of it's gonna be more automated, but a guy that's been making matzo for 35 years, I don't think many people in the world know what our dough-- maybe the other dough is different, but what our dough consistency should be in order to recreate our product.

So those guys are crucial in our success going forward.

So this right here looks like Rivington Street.

If you just zoom in right here, you could be in Rivington Street.

When we moved out of Rivington Street, we kept pretty much everything that was in there.

So we have approximately-- I would say seven tractor trailers of items from Rivington Street.

We're gonna be moving all that stuff up to Orangeburg, up to Rockland, and we're gonna have a little museum.

I haven't been back since I left.

The building, I've heard, on Rivington Street, that's gonna be condos.

But I was sad, very sad, when I left, and I've kind of--I've been all right since I-- since I've been gone, so I don't know if I want to dredge up those emotions right now.

Right now I'm just concentrating on here.

But...it just-- it was our home.

It's all all of us knew.

(Aron) I do miss standing outside, like, when we take a break, and just talking to all the neighbors or running across the street to the bodega.

But then also the same people you saw all the time, they're starting to get priced out of there.

They're gonna have to move and find new places to live.

And where are they gonna go?

I don't have the answer.

I just think you need a place for everybody to live, and they just--that's not gonna exist anymore.

You know, Zapata, he said, "I'll see you up in Orangeburg."

And that was the last-- you know, he always had a history of disappearing.

And he said he was gonna take some time off, he didn't want to come to New Jersey, but he probably said he would show up in Orangeburg.

Anthony's a survivor, he'll-- he'll be back at Streit's.

(Anthony) It was a sad thing.

We knew the company was suffering many burdens being here in the city, and the city really doesn't care.

You know, if-- if you have a business, a family-run business one day and the next day you're gone.

You know, it's not only on the Lower East Side, it's everywhere.

What is New York City becoming?

I don't know.

I don't know what New York City is becoming.

But when nobody can afford to work or live here anymore, then New York City's just gonna become another place.

They offered me a job at the factory, but me living in a neighborhood without a car, the commute is too long.

But I wish them the best.

You know, they're gonna be really missed in the neighborhood, and, you know, I'll miss them most of all.

You know, I think they're gonna do well.

I really think they're gonna do well.

(Aron) I haven't driven past the old factory since the last day I left.

I--I went down to the Lower East Side, I got close to it, but I just didn't want to drive past it yet, I wasn't ready.

So, I'd be really heartbroken if I walked past it and it just looked like a closed up old building that nothing's going on, so, it would hurt me more.

I'd rather see something that the building's still alive and something's going on there.

And I think I'd be more comfortable with that, even though that-- I'll have closure that it's not gonna be a matzo factory anymore, I would at least be able to say that the building's still alive.

I think that's--that's the way I like it to be remembered.

We definitely would have stayed in the Lower East Side if we could have, but, you know, if you look at the big picture, it's to keep the company going and that's what we're all in it for.

The family is still the family, it's still a family business.

The workers who are part of our family, a lot of them that came with us, it's still family to them.

That's probably my biggest blessing being here.

We realize that we had something special there, so we--we're not trying to make anything better, we're just trying to keep it-- it's gonna say "new and improved," but it's really just new and hopefully the same.

I'd like everything to be the same except that the address is no longer 150 Rivington Street, it's 171 Route 303 in Orangeburg.

But that really is our home.

It's still--we're still-- I still think of us as Lower East Side company even though we're not there anymore.

That's where our roots are, and it's not like we just put it behind us, the past.

The past is still a big part of our future.

(Elissa) Like everything, you can read stories in many, many different ways, but this story should be read as one of perseverance and loyalty to a neighborhood, and then at the point that the neighborhood itself is no longer recognizable, the family gets to reposition itself to keep the business going.

So it's a narrative of sorts with stages, but that middle stage of staying in the Lower East Side for five generations was a very precious one, and one that people will not forget.

(traditional music) ♪ ♪ (bright music)