Remembering the ‘Dream Factory’ of East Baltimore

August 16, 2022 JMORE Staff

A photo of East Baltimore's famed "Corned Beef Row," circa 1967. (FIle photo)

In less politically correct times, folks in the area used to refer to the Jewish section of East Baltimore as “Jewtown.” The 900, 1000 and 1100 blocks of East Lombard Street were the epicenter of Jewish life in Charm City, with sidewalks teeming with Yiddish-speaking immigrants, delicatessens and stores, tenement housing, shuls, shops, Yiddishe theaters, butchers and shochets (ritual slaughterers), bakeries, fruit stalls, a horseradish plant, the old Jewish Educational Alliance, fish sellers, dairies and such.

“Deep within East Baltimore’s mix of differing needs, motives, conflicting interests, and points of view was a singular, shared. unrelenting drive toward upward mobility, to ‘better oneself,’ to prosper beyond the level of subsistence, to shed the opprobrium of old country ‘greenhorns,'” wrote Gilbert Sandler in “Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album (Johns Hopkins University Press). “Jewish East Baltimore was more than a neighborhood of homes and push carts and struggling storekeepers. It was a dream factory.”

Those days are long gone, for the most part, but since the great Baltimore renaissance of the 1970s, the area has largely been known as “Corned Beef Row.” Besides the Jewish Museum of Maryland complex and the historic Lloyd Street and B’nai Israel synagogues, East Lombard Street remains the home to Attman’s Deli (at 1019) and Weiss Deli (1127).

In a recent segment of its “Five Minute Histories” video series, Baltimore Heritage, a nonprofit historic and architectural preservation organization, recalls the glory days of “Corned Beef Row.”