Life at One Manhattan Square means proximity to both the new and the enduring. A short distance inland is Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery — in business for more than a hundred years. It’s one of the few places in the city where the original version of the knish can still be found.
In New York City’s Lower East Side, where turnover is the rule, Yonah Schimmel’s has outlasted the trend cycle by several lifetimes. It has been on East Houston Street since 1910. Before that, it was a pushcart on the boardwalk in Coney Island. Today, the business is still run by the family that started it, still baking in the basement oven, and still sending up knishes by dumbwaiter. The location itself has shifted once — when the street was widened in the 1930s, the bakery moved from the north to the south side of East Houston — but the business never closed.
The menu is straightforward. The savory knishes are mostly traditional — potato, cabbage, kasha, spinach — with a few occasional additions that push the format without replacing it. Cheese versions lean sweet, usually paired with fruit. Drinks include Dr. Brown’s — those slightly strange, very New York sodas in flavors like black cherry and celery — plus cherry-lime rickeys and egg creams, which contain neither egg nor cream but do come in a tall glass and taste like a memory of some long-gone midcentury summer. Orders are written down, not keyed in. The bakery is open seven days a week, from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., and yes, they deliver.
Autographs cover parts of the wall — Joan Rivers, Martha Stewart, Barbra Streisand, various mayors, and a handful of senators. Photos from campaigns and TV shoots blend into the visual clutter. There’s no signage calling attention to any of it, and no effort to frame the place as a cultural site. The attention stays on the counter. A portrait of the bakery by Hedy Pagremanski hangs in the Museum of the City of New York, but inside the shop, it’s business as usual. People come in from different directions. Some have been coming here for decades, others are visitors who have just left the Tenement Museum or Katz’s Delicatessen down the block. There’s not much ceremony around the ordering process. Questions get answered. Knishes get wrapped. The chairs scrape. Customers eat and leave. The room fills, clears, fills again …
Just moments away are the luxury condos at One Manhattan Square, which include an experience in their own right, with everything from a full-floor spa to 75’ indoor saltwater pool to an acre of private garden space. Whether it’s the richness of neighborhood history or the modern convenience of 100,000 square-feet of amenities, One Manhattan Square embodies it all. For pricing and availability, contact the sales team today.