Streit’s Factory Fetches $30 Million
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Liza Schoenfein May 12, 2015
The oldest family-owned matzo company in the United States, Streit’s Matzo, is in contract to sell its Lower East Side factory buildings for a reported $30.5 million. According to New York real estate blog , a deed was filed with the city May 11 confirming the sale of the 90-year-old buildings to Cogswell Realty, a midtown-based real estate firm.
The company announced in January that it would be closing its doors after Passover. In a post on Bowery Boogie at the time, filmmaker Michael Levine, who made the documentary Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream, wrote: “Since 1925, the Streit’s Matzo factory has stood at 148-154 Rivington Street on New York’s Lower East Side. Here, in four, low-slung brick tenement buildings, five generations of the Streit family, and as many generations of factory workers, devoted their lives to the art of mixing flour and water, and sending these two simple ingredients through a seventy-three foot long oven to create sheets of matzo, the unleavened bread central to the Jewish holiday of Passover.”
Streit’s matzo produces 40 percent of the matzo sold in the U.S. The company has said that it plans to relocate its factory, perhaps to New Jersey.
Liza Schoenfein is the food editor of the Forward.
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