Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

NYC’s Jewish ‘Street Fair King’ Upset Over Cuts

To organizers, they’re colorful, family-oriented neighborhood celebrations. To detractors, they’re traffic-snarling commercial ventures that hijack streets and punish locals.

Now, after a long-simmering dispute over street fairs, New York City has decided to cut the size and hours of the outdoor bazaars, the Daily News reported this week.

Street fairs, “which often generate complaints from locals about their crowds, noise and generic offerings, will be cut by about 25%,” officials told the News.

The cuts “were greeted with applause by critics of street fairs, who often slam the events’ cookie-cutter rows of T-shirts, socks and Italian sausages,” the News said. “These are generic, soulless, corporate productions and they should be trimmed,” said New York City Councilman Daniel Garodnick, who represents Manhattan’s East Side. “They cause considerable disruption for many months of the year, for little benefit to the neighborhoods they’re in.”

But Mort Berkowitz — dubbed by the News as one of “the kings of New York City street fairs”, and the organizer of Little Italy’s massive annual San Gennaro festival — disagreed.

“Street festivals give local non-profits an opportunity to reach out to the public and promote themselves,” Berkowitz, founder of Mort & Ray Productions, told the Forward in an e-mail. Street fairs, he added, “give people an opportunity to have a family day — to walk in the streets with their children without having to worry about cars and bicycles, where they can be entertained by performing artist and be able to chat with their neighbors without spending any money.”

Jewish organizations benefit from street fairs too, Berkowitz contends. “Several local synagogues and Jewish organizations such as Project Open at Lincoln Center, Congregation Rodeph Sholom and Stephen Wise Free Synagogue have participated in our festivals,” he said.

In 2010, the News reported that Berkowitz’s company had taken in $1.2 million from vendors at 22 street fairs the previous year.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.