Later, Jerry

From today's New York Times:

June 3, 2007

An East Village Haven for Meat Lovers Closes Its Doors

By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

There is no more of the best-selling baked ham, which takes two and a half weeks to cure and 24 hours to smoke in the shop’s own smoke pits, and sold for $5.59 a pound. And there is very little left of the second big seller, kielbasa, which takes four hours to smoke, and sold for $4.79 a pound.

There is little of anything left in Kurowycky Meat Products Inc., which was 52 years and three generations in the making. It closed its doors yesterday in the East Village, succumbing to changing times and tastes.

Acclaimed among gourmets (James Beard was a fan), it was one of the last sausage makers in Manhattan owned by a family that operated its own smokehouse, about 20 or so steps from the cash register.

Jaroslaw Kurowycky Jr. (“Please, call me Jerry”), the principal owner, decided shortly after Easter that it was time to go. He started quietly drawing down his inventory of bacon, hams, kielbasa and 30 kinds of cold cuts so the cupboards would be as close to bare as possible.

Mr. Kurowycky (pronounced KOO-duh-vitsky), 48, and his staff of four spent the afternoon making two-handed handshakes with the male customers and hugging the women, some of whom, in turn, kissed their hands, a poignant gesture amid the denuded shelves.

Renata Szasiowska, a homemaker from Jersey City who was originally from Poland, clutched her bosom when she heard the bad news, then sadly said something in Polish.

Cynthia Tyler, 41, an engineering materials researcher who lives in the neighborhood, said, “I was a vegetarian at one point, and then their bacon was my downfall.”

Mr. Kurowycky, wearing a butcher’s shirt with a pencil in his left pocket, said there was nothing in particular that killed the store.

He said that people these days eat less sausage and meat products in general. “What was 20 years, 30 years ago a staple on your table every night,” he said, referring to ham and other meats, “is now a holiday item.”

The store was founded in 1955 by Mr. Kurowycky’s grandfather Erast. His first store was on Avenue B, between 10th and 11th Streets, in the East Village. He retired in 1973, and Mr. Kurowycky’s father, Jaroslaw, moved the shop to its final location at 124 First Avenue, near East Seventh Street. It was one of the last purveyors to specialize in the smoking and curing methods popular in Eastern Europe before World War II.

The shop’s heyday was the 1970s, when the elder Jaroslaw Kurowycky employed a staff of 13, triple the number today. Mimi Sheraton, in a Dec. 17, 1975, article in The New York Times, praised the shop’s “impeccable quality.” The headline read, “A Mecca for Sausage and Ham Lovers.”

But the neighborhood, once a stronghold of Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Germans, Lithuanians, Hungarians and Russians, changed as those groups prospered and moved away. Younger couples and families ate out or ordered in.

Sales fell a few percentage points every few years; Sept. 11, 2001, hurt business, and it never fully came back, Mr. Kurowycky said. “It just slowly slipped away from us,” he said.

What remains is a brown and gold sign over the cash register reading “FRESH MEAT DEP’T Please Wait For your Next In Line.” And there is the master butcher’s diploma his grandfather was awarded in 1936 in Gorodenka, Ukraine. He fled the Nazis, then the Communists, before arriving in New York in 1949.

Mr. Kurowycky said he was considering a range of options for when the shop closed. His family owns the five-story brick building and may rent out the space.

But first, he planned to have drinks with friends and family, and put the Grateful Dead or Frank Sinatra on the stereo.

“It’ll either be ‘What a long, strange trip it’s been’ or ‘My Way,’ ” he said, smiling. “Maybe I’ll play both.”