Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Mourning the loss of Dubrow's

The playwright Donald Margulies reminisces about Dubrow's:

"To have come of age in Eisenhower-era, baby-boomer Brooklyn was to feel cheated of the glory days. By the late '60s, public school education, which had served me and my fellow boomers so well for a time, was no longer a panacea for upwardly mobile middle-class kids. The families of those kids moved upward — or outward — to the suburban promise of Long Island and sent once-solid Brooklyn neighborhoods spiraling downward. Once urban flight took hold, the last vestiges of my parents' Brooklyn vanished. Streets and subways were no longer safe. The Sheepshead movie theatre was converted into a roller-skating rink; the Elm Theatre became a bank. Ebinger's Bakery, famous for its chocolate blackout cakes, went out of business and Dubrow's Cafeteria, best known for its kasha varnishkas, closed its revolving doors."

Originally in the Los Angles Times, reprinted in Playbill. You can read the whole article here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't abandon the Dubrow's blog. A memory always comes to me around Passover time of the matzoh boxes stacked atop the counter. Although there was no apparent changes in the kitchen you were able to order your chopped liver with egg matzoh.

A question I've always been curious about was the interior designer or firm that did the design, what other spaces did they design, how was the design arrived at, who did the murals?

-Marcia

Eve said...

I have no intention of abandoning the Dubrow's blog - I just haven't had anything new to post for awhile. But I've got a new story and a photo I need to scan in, and a couple cousins who should be sending me more soon.

I asked my aunt (Irving Kaplan's oldest daughter) about the murals and she didn't remember them at all. So I'm still in search of more info about them...