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Yorkville prepares for Pope's visit

By Matthew Sweeney | msweeney@am-ny.com

April 7, 2008

Glaser Bakery, which opened in 1902, is located at 1670 1st Ave. on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Originally shot on April 4, 2008 and published on April 7, 2008 in a feature on the remaining German culture and heritage in Yorkville (Upper East Side of Manhattan) where the Pope will be visiting during his tour to New York City. During his visit the Pope will be giving a German Mass at St. Joseph's Church at 404 East 87th Street. (Dave Sanders / April 6, 2008)

If all goes to plan, Pope Benedict XVI will walk out of St. Joseph's Church on his first day in New York City and see a cluster of blue and white flags from his native Bavaria waving to him from across East 87th Street.

The flag event -- which awaits Secret Service approval -- is a gesture of welcome from the people who keep the neighborhood's almost-vanished German heritage alive. Yorkville's German culture, with East 86th Street as its "German Broadway," has disappeared during the past 50 years and been replaced by the likes of Banana Republic and Baby Gap. But for the few who remember the Bavarian Inn, the Café Hindenburg, and Karl Ehmers' butcher shop, the pope's visit to St. Joseph's is a last hurrah of national pride.

One of those who hope for permission to wave the Bavarian flag is Julia Winter, who emigrated to Yorkville from Germany in a distant year she is too modest to name. She arrived in the neighborhood in what many consider a Germanic golden era from the 1930s through the 1960s, when people were polite, food was heavy, and beer came in steins. Instead of Petco and Barnes & Noble, East 86th Street was lined with dessert cafes like the Kleine Conditerei, German-language theaters, cinemas, brauhauses, restaurants like the Rhineland, and the Lorelei dancehall for young singles.

"It was an elegant way to go out," said Kathryn Jolowicz, a neighborhood native and historian. "It's not like the meat rack you have now at singles' bars. The guys stand around drinking beer from bottles. I don't like it. Put it in a glass for heaven's sake!"

Many families, like the Jolowiczs and the Winters, spoke German at home. When Winter started first grade at St. Joseph's School she spoke no English. Now, she arranges a German-language Mass once a month at the church. There are other parishes that have an occasional Mass in German, but St. Joseph's has been New York's German national parish since it was founded in 1874.

"That we can have the pope visit a church that was founded by fellow Germans is a very nice touch," said Joseph Zwilling, the spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York. "It really is a little gem of a church."

Besides the monthly Mass, there are a few remnants of the old German neighborhood. Schaller & Weber, a butcher shop, survives, as does the Heidelberg restaurant, where people gather at their Stammtisch -- "regular table" -- on the first Wednesday of the month to talk in German and drink beer. Lesser known is the Glaser Bakery, a family business since 1902, on First Avenue near East 88th Street.

Brothers Herb and John Glaser still run the bakery their grandfather started in 1902 after emigrating from Bavaria. There's nothing ersatz in the bakery's original wood cabinets, pressed tin ceiling, and tile floor. When Herb Glaser, 55, was growing up, there were still German restaurants on East 86th Street, but it never struck him as a particularly German place, not that Yorkville wasn't special.

"It always felt like a small town to me, the neighborhood," he said. "Everyone in the neighborhood knows me, which is nice. Whether it was specifically German or not it had a small-town feel in the middle of Manhattan, which I liked."

Almost forgotten is the Kolping House on East 88th Street. Built in 1914, the house is a branch of the worldwide Catholic Kolping Society which runs dormitories, once intended for traveling apprentices, but still popular today as an affordable place to stay among business and banking interns from Germany. "Unfortunately, those are about the only things that are left," Winter said.

She was offered one of the 10 tickets reserved for parishioners to attend the ecumenical prayer service with Pope Benedict, but she gave it to a sister from the School Sisters of Notre Dame, the order of nuns that founded and once ran St. Joseph's School. Instead, Winter took one of the 350 tickets to stand in the street and hope for a chance to let the pope know that some fellow Bavarians are there to cheer him.

"I would say Gruss Gott," Winter said using the greeting popular in Germany's Catholic south. "The Bavarians don't say 'Guten Tag.' Then I would just glow, I think, and say how happy I am, and ask for his blessing."