Tag Archives: Ohab Zedek

Land Suit Leads to Wedding

07 Sunday Apr 2013

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This is the background story to a wedding in our building on December 26, 1910 with 700 guests, officiated by Rabbi Philip Klein of Ohab Zedek, First Hungarian Orthodox Congregation.

A case in the Second District Municipal Court, in Madison Street [59 Madison Street -ed.] will lead today to a wedding in the Lower East Side.

Both the bride and the bridegroom are lawyers. They met in the Madison Street Court several weeks ago, one as defending counsel, the other as counsel for the complainant, and their friends say that each was deeply impressed with the skill the other displayed in handling the case.

The bridegroom is Harris Koppelman, whose office is at 302 Broadway. He is a member of the Congregation Ohab Zedek, on Norfolk Street. The bride is Esther Kunstler, daughter of Felix Kunstler, a real estate dealer of 158 Rivington Street.

..The case was won by Miss Kunstler’s client. When Miss Kunstler and Mr. Koppelman left court, however, they were best friends.

Whether the bride intends to continue her practice of law after the wedding will not be decided just yet, say her friends. She and her husband will think that over during their honeymoon which will be spent somewhere in the South. The Rev. Dr. Plilip Klein will perform the ceremony, and several hundred friends of the young lawyers are expected at the wedding. [“Land Suit Leads to Wedding – Bride and Bridegroom First Met in Court as Opposing Counsel”, The New York York Times, December 26, 1910]

By January the wedding report became news in society columns. This is a faded picture of bride and groom with the headline ” Defeated in Court – Weds Girl Lawyer – New York Attorney Loses in Law Clash but Wins with Cupid” on page 3 of the Spokane Daily Chronicle, January 5, 1911.

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By the time of her wedding, Esther Kunstler had established herself as a dedicated professional and even earned the recognition of the press. Below are excerpts from contemporary sources:

The East Side of New York has  a Portia who is making a success of her chosen vocation.  She is Esther Kunstler, aged 22, and she has become champion for hundreds, not only in the  city’s police courts, but in the supreme court. She has been regularly admitted to the bar and has a shingle hung out in Rivington Street. The girl has taken upon herself the task of defending the poor people of the East Side. She is becoming famous for courtroom repartee. (The American Israelite, June 26, 1906)

“Oh, how could you do that?” – she exclaimed to the jury when they returned a verdict of guilty in the 19 years old Jacob Rosenstein’s case, charged with burglary. “..a nice, innocent boy like that!” The judge, finding that the boy was never been in trouble before, allowed him to go on a suspended sentence. (The New York Tribune June 8, 1906)

She talks to judge and jury in a “winning manner”, and her witticism keeps everybody in good humor. She generally creates somewhat of a sensation when she appears in a courtroom, for she looks more like a school girl than a lawyer. As she speaks six languages fluently, her list of clients grown steadily. Many of the poor whose rights she has championed look upon her as a sort of angel upon earth.

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She loves her profession, and her father says that it is hardly likely that she will ever abandon it to marry. On this question Ms. Kunstler is uncommunicative. “My work is my life” – she said. I am happiest when I am defending some of my clients. It is a great work and I hope to make my mark some day. (Boston Advocate Oct 26, 1906 via syndication from The Globe).

Following the wedding in 1910 the two lawyers (both NYU Law School graduates, 1904 for Harris & 1906 for Esther) join forces and operate out of Esther’s law office on 144 Rivington Street up to the late 1930s, just next door to the Kunstler family’s home and properties on the block  (one of them being the building of ABC No Rio of subsequent fame.)

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Names & Numbers

15 Friday Feb 2013

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Part of the grassland covering the island of Manhattan during the Lenape era, our land on today’s Norfolk Street lay a short but safe distance from the salt meadows of the East Side. The street, in its earliest incarnation, was a small dirt road cutting into the bucolic land of Pieter Stuyvesant, Director General of the Dutch West India Company, just off  Mr. Jones’ property.

Like neighboring Essex and Suffolk Street, it was named after English counties in the early days of English settlement.

We made a bold attempt to locate Norfolk Street and mark the present location of our building on early maps.

1762 map

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1776 map

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In the 1770s, it neatly fit into the island’s first planned street layout, the DeLancey Farm’s grid forming one of the main roads with access to the North from waterways.

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James DeLancey developed ‘East-West’ accessibility with new thoroughfares below the spacious core of his estate, the DeLancey Square, modeled after London’s great Georgian residential enclaves.

The street that today runs just South of our building was named after his estate foreman George Stanton, a diligent worker, even after General Washington’s American War of Independence forced the Loyalist DeLancey to desert his entire (legal and natural) family and abandon all his property in the colonies.

In January 1782 Stanton sends a letter to DeLancey’s refuge in London.“I have made it my Business to acquaint your tenants…they answer me in general. Let’s know how the war will end,” writes Stanton to his exiled master.  A year later representation of DeLancey’s affairs falls to his friend, Mr. James Rivington (publisher of a pro-British paper during the Revolution and according to some accounts a secret spy for George Washington) who shares the difficulties of his predecessor. Rivington writes, “this must prove most inconvenient and highly mortifying to you” but hints at some [unrealized] hope in 1783: “I flatter myself you will still be able to recover the whole by either by an exception from a prosecution act, or the fair construction of the Treaty.”

As part of major events in the year of 1805 Cradle Days of New York (1609-1825) lists the paving of Norfolk Street.

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Maps show Norfolk Street connecting Division Street–the oirginal dividing line between the Rutgers Farm and the DeLancey Farm in the colonial era–with North Street, a strategic thoroughfare that constituted the geographic border of municipal development on New York’s East Side up until the early 19th century.

Starting with City Council documents from 1808, North Street becomes Houston Street; the name’s origin and pronunciation is a hot topic to this day. It involved the donation of a cut-through tract of land on the West side of the island (between Bowery Lane and Broadway) that enabled the city to connect a street named Houston to the prominent North street (see map below.) It is reasonable to believe that the street’s nomenclature originates as a grand gesture from the wealthy landowner Nicholas Bayard III, towards his daughter, Mary. She had married a certain William Houstoun [no typo], a delegate to the Continental Congress from 1784 through 1786 and to the United States Constitutional Convention in 1787.

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The 1811 Commissioners’ Plan established the foundations of the city grid as we know it, anchored it around the little pedestrian island we now call Peretz Square, just off today’s First Avenue and First Street. The names of the streets below Houston street and East of Essex street, an already established grid, got incorporated with no change into the master plan of the growing city.

1847 map

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When a piece of land was purchased by congregation Anshi Chesed in 1849 to build a new synagogue on Norfolk Street, the empty lot was assigned 142-146; the numbering ended with 162 at Houston Street.

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In 1886 Ohab Zedek First Hungarian Orthodox Congregation purchased the building and dedicated it on August 13.  During the following year they received numerous renovation permits for their new home at 142-46 Norfolk Street. When their rabbi Philip Klein finally arrived in 1890, they celebrated his installation in the same building but at 172-176 Norfolk Street (the address of our building today.)

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