A History of Galinsky's Department Store

161 French Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Tel KI5-0161, "Outfitter for Ladies and Gents"

by William Wallen

It is 7:55 am on a weekday as the door to the second-floor apartment above the storefront at 161 French Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey opens, revealing an odd figure. He is small, not more than five feet four inches tall, and he is nattily attired in a gray, two-piece, Hart, Schaffner & Marx suit that is well-tailored to his trim frame. His shirt is starched, his tie is tied just so, his cap-toe shoes are shined to a high luster, and his hair is combed straight back from his forehead. What makes him odd is that he is holding a push-broom that he immediately puts to work on the sidewalk in front of his store. He sweeps from the sidewalk of Siegel's Pharmacy on the left, to the sidewalk of Rubel's Hardware Store on the right, and then he attends to the tiled walk in front of his own door, giving special attention to the brightly colored Italian tiles that form a diamond with a capital "G" in the middle. Done sweeping, he places a key into the lock of the brass door handle of the elegant double doors, inset with beveled glass. This stylish street-sweeper is my maternal immigrant grandfather, Isidor Galinsky. And with a twist of his wrist, Galinsky's Department Store, 161 French Street. New Brunswick, New Jersey, is open for another business day.

Isidor Galinsky was born on December 28, 1895, in Ostrin, Belarus. At least that's the date he chose as his birthday, for as my mother always said, no one back in the shtetls of Imperial Russia really knew when he or she was born on the Gregorian calendar. That was the date that he gave to the United States Army, too, when, in 1918, he received the one-cent postcard with the message that began, "Greetings from your President." He was given a regulation US Army doughboy uniform complete with buttoned flap pockets and puttees, and sent to Buffalo, New York for basic training. He was given too, from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Hebrew-English prayer book, the inside cover of which bears the inscription in ink: "To Prv. Isidor Galinsky, with best wishes from Morris Cahan, June 14, 1918." My grandfather, of course, never left Buffalo. The war ended on November 11, 1918, or as Grandpa once told me, "when the Kaiser heard that Galinsky was coming, he signed the Armistice, quick." But the United States government was grateful for Isidor Galinsky's brief service, which it expressed by giving him two pieces of paper. One stated that he was an honorably discharged veteran; the other, that in recognition of his willingness to fight for his adopted country, he was now a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Isidor Galinsky found his way to the Garment District of Manhattan, where he and a cousin, using the stipends they had received when leaving the Army, rented a loft and set up a business manufacturing baby clothes. He and the cousin sold the business in 1920, each realizing $5,000, then a truly princely sum. Grandpa then turned his eye to his life's ambition—becoming a merchant, owning his own store. He found a vacant lot at 161 French Street in New Brunswick, on which had stood a wooden storefront that had recently burned to the ground. Isidor Galinsky, by now a United States citizen and honorably discharged veteran of the War to End All Wars, had no trouble securing a mortgage for $32,000 for the three-story, brick storefront he had planned for the site.

Around the same time Grandpa also found Henrietta Byron, born Yenta Byarsky on January 2, 1896 (or so she said—Grandma too had no real idea when her birth date fell on the Gregorian calendar), the youngest, green-eyed daughter of an immigrant family in Perth Amboy. They were married in her family's home in 1921. She was to become Grandpa's business partner for a lifetime.

The building that Isidor Galinsky put up on 161 French Street was three stories high, with an ornamental tan-brick front with white trim. On the first floor was the storefront for his business, to be called "Galinsky's Department Store." The double doors that led inside were recessed ten feet from the sidewalk, creating a small, covered plaza that Grandpa covered in tiles, including the ornamental "G". On the left was the men's window, on the right was the women's, and in the middle was a free-standing glass showcase filled with shoes for the entire family. Inside, the store itself was arranged similarly: women's and children's wear on the left, men's wear and work clothes on the right, house linens in the center, shoes in the rear. Overhead there was an ornate ceiling made of embossed tin, the kind much favored in neo-retro coffeehouses today. Grandpa, always in a suit and tie, stood in the middle, behind a counter that bore his brass cash register, under which were bags for purchases, and paper and ribbon for gift wrapping (always complementary with your purchase at Galinsky's). Behind him in a special cabinet built into the wall were ladies' hosiery, sold in those days in flat boxes. I was privileged to learn later that if you removed certain of these hosiery boxes, it revealed a space in the wall where Grandpa secreted extra cash. His box ad in the fancy new Yellow Pages proclaimed Galinsky's to be "Outfitter to Ladies and Gents." When the store opened for business in 1922, Isidor Galinsky, its proud, American proprietor, was not yet twenty-seven years old.

The apartment over the store was spacious, with two bedrooms, a den, and back porch, in addition to a large dining room and parlor for entertaining. But for my grandparents, the apartment above was really an extension of the store below—or vice versa. They lived their lives equally—and usually separately,—in both. Grandpa would man the store in the morning, while Grandma did housework upstairs and tended to her two American-named daughters, Dorothy, my mother, born soon after the store's opening, and Florence, born in 1926. There was a steam pipe that ran up from the basement, behind the cash register in the store and up into Grandma's kitchen, and when she was done preparing lunch or dinner, she'd clang on that pipe with a wooden spoon, and then head downstairs to mind the store. Grandpa would soon come upstairs and serve himself a meal. Although they lived right above where they worked, my grandparents did not eat a meal together on a day the store was open for forty years.

French Street was the business district for a working-class neighborhood that was home to immigrants from Hungary and Germany, as well as many other ethnic groups, and Galinsky's was French Street's largest dry goods store. Also in the neighborhood were an A&P market, a Buick dealer, a butcher and a barbershop, all of which assured steady foot traffic for Galinsky's. Grandpa's business acumen carried him comfortably through the Great Depression, and past challenges from rival retailers. During the Depression, when money was tight, he could, if necessary, always take cash from the till, and bargain with a supplier for more favorable terms of payment. During World War II, if a cousin or a steady customer needed an extra pair of work jeans, but lacked a ration slip, he could always slip a blank piece of paper into the stack of ration slips that he returned to the authorities, writing on it "Lost the original." When the A&P moved to larger quarters up the block, its place was taken by another dry goods store, whose owner announced to the business community that he would put Galinsky out of business. On the morning of his grand opening, Grandpa was ready. After the daily sweep of his sidewalk, he placed a sandwich sign he had made on the sidewalk of his new competitor, opposite his door. It had an arrow pointing to 161 French Street, and read: "Main Entrance to Galinsky's". The competitor did not last long.

Mercantile life during the last century was long and hard, but relatively simple. The Galinskys had two phones, one in the store and one in the dining room, but only one number for both. Grandpa kept the store's books in his elegant longhand, in canvas-and-leather-bound books marked "General Ledger." But above all, the store had to remain open, and that meant my grandparents had to take separate vacations. For one week each summer, my grandfather would go off to Stier's bungalow colony in the Catskills ("Let Stier's steer you"), often in the company of his younger brother Sam, who was also a merchant, across the county in Perth Amboy. He would return, and Grandma would head off to Stier's with Sam's wife, Dora. It was not until my mother was twenty and in college, and deemed mature enough to operate the store on her own that they took a vacation together.

Above all, Grandpa considered himself a part of the greater French Street community. Every committee that set about to build a church in the area knew that they could expect a donation from Galinsky. The beveled-glass doors to the store displayed numerous badge-shaped stickers attesting to his yearly donation to the New Brunswick Policemen's Benevolent Association. During the end of the Great Depression, a steady customer came in with her teenage daughter, whom she could no longer afford to support. Grandpa decided that the household could use a domestic, and took her in. Once, late on a Thursday night, I was hanging out with Grandpa as he was closing up, when a customer—an African-American man in work clothes—came in to purchase blue jeans. It was sometime in the early 1960s, a time when Negro Americans, as we called them then, were becoming impatient with the racism of society, and white Americans were just beginning to find this out. Although it was past the nine o'clock closing time, and Grandpa had already turned off most of the lights, he turned them all on again, and told the man to take his time. Grandpa sold him a pair of work jeans, made change, escorted him to the door, and finished closing up. As we ascended the steps to the apartment, I said, "You know, Grandpa, you could have just told that guy that you were closed, and to come back tomorrow." "Billy," he replied, "everyone who comes into my store gets the same respect." That was as much instruction in civil rights as I ever needed.

The French Street business area and Galinsky's Department store rose and declined together. In 1949, my mother married Herbert Wallen of Lakewood, and Grandpa took him into the store, with an eye to selling the store to him when he would retire. Business surged a bit with the influx into the area of refugees from the abortive Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union in 1956, but otherwise the neighborhood sagged, as the old immigrant base passed on, and their children began to shop in the strip malls and shopping centers that were then beginning to be built around Middlesex County. And like many Jewish immigrant merchants, ultimately Grandpa had no heir. My father, aged 38, died in 1959 of cancer of the kidney, a disease for which, even today, there is little treatment, let alone a cure.

Beginning in the 1950s, Grandpa suffered a succession of strokes and heart attacks, brought on, perhaps, by the cigarettes he began smoking when he was a doughboy. He sold the business to a long-time sales clerk and made plans to retire.

On Sunday afternoon, November 8, 1964, Grandma Galinsky hosted a meeting of the Byron Family Circle, known informally as the "Cousins Club". The apartment above the store was filled with Grandma's sisters and their husbands, their children and grandchildren. There was a chocolate sheet cake in honor of my brother Daniel's ninth birthday the next day. Grandpa, elegantly tailored as usual, stood among his two daughters and six thoroughly American grandchildren, in the building and life that he had built in America, and looked proud. We left that evening around seven, bearing the remains of the birthday cake. That night, around eleven, Grandma called. Grandpa had suffered a heart attack and was dead.

The funeral of Isidor Galinsky was held in the Ahavas Achim synagogue, where my grandfather had prayed for many years. Rabbi Joseph Maza of South River, a family friend, officiated. For weeks afterward, as I walked home from school up Livingston Avenue, strangers would stop me to ask, "Are you a Galinsky?" and express their condolences.

The sale of Galinsky's department store and 161 French Street to Grandpa's clerk was completed soon after his death. Grandma moved to a newly constructed apartment building in Highland Park, where she died in 1967. Galinsky's Department Store died soon after, in 1969, when the clerk, unable to make a go of a dry goods store in a declining neighborhood, defaulted. Grandpa's heirs, his daughters, Dorothy Wallen and Florence Becker, suddenly found themselves the unwilling owners of the building they grew up in. They sold the building to the St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Store, again holding the note. After the thrift store also defaulted, they sold the building for cash to a pastor who wanted to turn the store into a street-level church. Dorothy and Florence received $29,000—less than their father had paid to build it more than forty years before.

Isidor Galinsky lived a simple life. The farthest he ever traveled was Army boot camp in Buffalo in the north, Atlantic City in the south, Philadelphia in the west, and his older brother Joe's home in Ansonia, Connecticut in the east. Mostly, he traveled up and down the steep staircase between his store and the apartment above it. When I left college and began my own ascent in the world, I realized that I, unlike so many others, did not have to begin my life on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Isidor Galinsky climbed that rung for me, and in gratitude, when my son was born in 1989, I gave him the middle name Isaac.

Whenever I am in New Brunswick these days, I make a point of driving down French Street. The neighborhood is still home to immigrants, only now they are from Central America. Grandpa's store is now a bodega. And where once it smelled of shoe leather and denim, it now smells of plantains and coconut milk.

And the sidewalk? The sidewalk in front of 161 French Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey looks as if it has not been swept in many years.