A major correction

After spending much of last year collecting oral history from family members about Dubrow's, it appears I am entering a new phase of memorializing Dubrow's - the research phase.

I recently discovered that the New York Times has a database of archived articles going back to 1851. Many of these, it turns out, mention Dubrow's, so over the next few weeks I will be sorting through these articles and making sense of them. A few of them are incomplete in the online database, but I've got the references so I can trek out to the library to find the originals.

Let's start with a major correction: when Dubrow's Cafeteria actually began. I had always placed the beginning of Dubrow's as being in the 1950's, but now I think that may just be the Manhattan restaurant.

The following little blurb gives me new information, and also raises a few questions:

"Dubrow's Cafeteria chain has leased 6,000 square feet of store space in Irving Steinberg's twelve-unit taxpayer at 353 Broadway in Woodmere, L.I. for its first retail food and bake shop. Mr. Steinberg twenty-three years ago leased space in Brooklyn to Dubrow's for its first cafeteria." (New York Times, July 20, 1952)

Doing a little math, based on the year the blurb was published, the first Dubrow's was opened in 1929 - much earlier than I had thought. This would have been either the Eastern Parkway Dubrow's or the King's Highway Dubrow's. The earliest articles I found in the New York Times about Dubrow's go back to 1941. Those will be forthcoming.

But what is this about a "food and bake shop" in Woodmere, Long Island? I don't know anything about this venture.