In
The New Yorker
E. B. White called Jacob Volk “the greatest wrecker of all time.”
CAVIAR
On the job demolishing the old Princeton College plot in New Jersey, Jacob Volk walked into his bank and noticed a teller with chestnut hair. My father’s father was forty-two when they married. She was seventeen. He had the underwear for Ethel Edythe Shure’s trousseau tatted by nuns in Switzerland. On their wedding day, mindful of the Orthodox tradition, he did not forget the poorest of the poor, making donations to the Daughters of Jacob, the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, Machsikei Talmud Torah, Hebrew Day Nursery, Keidaner Association Charity Fund, Tipheret Israel, the Bronx Hospital, and the New York Federation of Charities.
Jake leveled the lot in Bensonhurst he’d won in a card game from Mayor James J. “Jimmy” Walker and built his bride a house. He designed a marble shower with eighteen silver heads that pelted everything on three sides from the ankles on up, and a frieze of Volk family crests that girdled the second floor. He took Ethel on a grand tour and bought her monogrammed place plates from Czechoslovakia, challah knives from Holland, and a dancing-girl piano lamp with a liftable skirt from Bohemia. My son, Peter, shaves with the fitted kit Jake picked up in London.
“Is he oiling the leather?” Dad asks now and then.
When they returned from their honeymoon, Jake gave her a Stromberg-Carlsson “Marconi.” Evenings they’d turn it on, and Jake would open the living-room windows so the neighbors could sit on their orange crates in his garden and listen.
Jake’s father, Sussman Volk, left Lithuania for New York in 1887. He’d been a miller in Vilna, but New York was already a big city and didn’t need millers. Sussman had seven children. He took stock of what he could do and became a tinker. He sold pots and pans off his back. On the road he slept in the stables of the people he sold pots to. While praying one morning, Sussman was kicked by a horse which made him tear his hair and shout, “My life lacks dignity!”
Once again Reb Sussel changed careers. Being a religious man, he knew how to butcher meat. He opened a small butcher shop at 86½ Delancey Street. The first week, a Romanian friend stopped by.
“Could you store a trunk for me in the basement?” he asked. “I’ve got to go back to Romania for a few years.”
“If I store your trunk,” Reb Sussel said, “what will you give me?”
“If you store my trunk, I will give you the recipe for pastrami.”
Sussman took the trunk and the recipe and began selling hunks of pastrami over the counter. Customers liked it so much, they started dropping by for a slice. Then they wanted the slices between two pieces of rye. Before long they were coming in for sandwiches more than they were coming in for meat. Sussman Volk brought pastrami to the New World. He moved from 86½ Delancey Street to 88 Delancey Street, put in a few tables, and the first New York deli was born. Legend has it that about this time his older brother, Uncle Albert, became the first man to stir scallions into cream cheese.
Sussman and Sarah had four daughters and three sons. The girls—Becky, Hannah, Anna, and Ettie—couldn’t agree on anything. When they met for lunch, they each went home a different way. Albert, Leonard, and my grandfather were the boys. Every day after school all seven of the children worked in the deli making toodles. A toodle is a little square of waxed paper rolled into a cone with a dollop of mustard in it. You could take a toodle to work in the morning with a piece of cold meat and squeeze a squiggle of fresh mustard on it at lunch. But Jake didn’t like making toodles. He didn’t like being told what to do. So he quit the deli and got a job taking tickets on the Fifth Avenue trolley. On his first run he bumped into a woman he knew. “You, Jake? A conductor?” she said. He rode to the end of the line and got off. But not before he noticed a building being taken down. He scraped together three hundred dollars and bought a horse and wagon, crowbars, and sledges. On the side of the wagon he painted what became his lifetime logo: “The Most Destructive Force on Wall Street.”
At first, the lone New York Jew in shoring and wrecking had trouble finding work. Then he got an idea. He’d do something nobody else did. He’d offer to pay for the privilege of tearing buildings down. He’d make his profit salvaging mantelpieces, doors, wood panels, chandeliers, conduits, steel, pipe, and scrap iron. He’d bundle and recycle the wood.
Jake got busy. Everything he demolished was sold. Broken bricks and concrete that weren’t salvageable got dumped in New York swamps for landfill. Unemployed men called Klondikers chipped cement off good bricks, and Jake got a nickel for each one. Like his father-in-law, who had a junkyard in Princeton, and his son, who makes sculptures out of Dumpster finds, Jake knew everything had worth. He paid his men on Friday in his offices at 103 Park Avenue. He paid them in cash, then offered them a swig from a bottle of whiskey he kept on his desk next to a blackjack.
Two years before she met William Randolph Hearst, Marian Davies had an affair with Jake. He liked women. She liked powerful, heavy-jawed men. But starting out, Jake couldn’t afford to live on his own. He asked his older brother, Albert, if it would be okay to move in with him. “You can stay at my place on one condition,” Albert said.
“No women.”
Then Albert came home early one afternoon and found a pink feather floating in the air above his bed.
“Out!” He pointed to the door.
Wrecking was a gambler’s game. Contracts contained time clauses. A wrecker had to pit his experience against the strength of walls. Jake had gone to technical schools on the Lower East Side. He understood the value of speed. He used this understanding to invent a faster way to gut a building. He called it the Upside-down Method of House Wrecking. During the first quarter of the century, there were all kinds of buildings in New York: skeleton-frame, wall-bearing types, fireproof buildings made of steel and concrete. Using the Upside-down Method, Jake attacked them inside from the first floor instead of the top. He left only enough of the structural frame to support the walls. As the demolition continued, the debris fell inward, accumulating at the bottom of the building’s shell. Shovels moved in. Jake carried a stopwatch. He timed it. Power shovels could fill a seven-yard truck in three minutes. The same amount of debris took a half hour to load using chutes from the top of a building connected to hoppers. Jake tore down the Cotton Exchange so fast he got a bonus of thirty thousand dollars. In his
New Yorker
obituary, E. B. White said Jake had “a genius for speed.” He toppled the Third Avenue El to make way for the subway. He tore down banks so that bigger banks could rise. After Jake died, his brother Albert used the Upside-down Method to clear three midtown blocks for the construction of Rockefeller Center. Two hundred buildings were demolished.
Around the time of the Upside-down Method, Jake got another idea. Ramming had been used for razing since Mesopotamia. But ramming wasn’t effective on New York’s multistoried buildings. How do you ram a sky-scraper? On the other hand, what if you could ram
in the air
? What if you could attach something to a crane and what you attached did the ramming? What if the thing that rammed was on a chain that swung so the rammer could build momentum? The wrecking ball was born.
Jake took down the old Bankers Trust Building at the corner of Nassau and Wall Streets, directing a hundred men from the ground with a megaphone. According to
Distinguished Jews of
America,
although the work was dangerous, “one of the great characteristics of Mr. Jacob Volk is that he never sends a man where he would not go himself.”
Jake loved every part of taking down a building, from laying the plans to selling the mantels. In thirty years he demolished twenty-five hundred buildings. That’s eighty-three buildings a year, or one and three-quarters a week. Jake hated the buildings of Stanford White. They were made too well. “When he built ’em, they stayed built,” Jake said. Normally when his men chopped a hole in a floor ten percent the size of the floor, the other ninety percent caved in. Not in a White building. The firm of McKim, Mead & White (hundreds of whose landmarked buildings still stand) patented a vaulting system that used four-inch by eight-inch Guastavino tiles. Between two layers of these tiles was a layer of concrete. A White floor was self-supporting. If you made a hole in a White floor ten percent the size of the floor, you’d have to make nine more holes.
Is this something only a demolitionist’s family fantasizes about? I like to pretend I have the power to knock down any three buildings in New York. Most of the time, it’s the same three buildings, the three that bring me up short every day: 40 East Ninety-fourth Street, a faceted beige-brick behemoth with bronze windows completely out of scale and character with my neighborhood. And 45 East Eighty-ninth Street, an Emery Roth & Sons tower with a scooped-out façade that creates a punishing wind tunnel whenever there’s a breeze. And the MetLife building behind the Helmsley Building. The Helmsley Building didn’t need a backdrop. Looking south, the silhouette of the Helmsley Building (originally the New York Central Building) was an instant blast of neo-Baroque light-shaped beauty and a salute, with its giant gilded God-flanked clock, to the glory and precision of America’s railroads. The MetLife Building (still called the Pam Am building) turned a fifty-one-block vista into a dead end. I’d be happy reducing it to rubble.
In keeping with tradition, Jake and his sisters all named their firstborn sons after their father, Sussman Volk. My father is Sussman Volk too, and his three first cousins are Sussman Stavin, Sussman Fleschner, and Sussman Joseph. The four boys were nicknamed Sussel, which became Cecil. Cecil Volk, Cecil Stavin, Cecil Fleschner, and Cecil Joseph. They never changed their names legally, but that’s what it says on their passports.
When Jake died, he left an estate worth $254,000. Finally his sisters agreed on something. They wanted that money. Ettie, Becky, Hannah, and Anna got together and sued to take Jake’s children from their mother. They said Ethel couldn’t manage money. That she’d squander the children’s annuities. The sisters were right. Ethel didn’t know the first thing about money. When she wanted something, “No” wasn’t an option. If she passed a store with something pretty in the window, she’d stop in the street, take out her address book, and see who she could send it to.
Eventually Ethel won the lawsuit. She kept her three children then gave two away. The eldest, Aunt Helen, was raised by Ethel’s parents in Princeton. And even though Jake wanted my father to be a rabbi, Dad was plucked out of Yeshiva and shipped off to military school so he could “learn to be a man.” At twenty-nine, Ethel was a rich and beautiful widow encumbered by only one little girl.
Jake’s executors made sure his wishes were honored. My grandmother couldn’t remarry before all three children married, or she’d forfeit her trust. The will also specified that the children could not get the balance of their trusts until they married. If a child married out of the faith, that child would forfeit his or her inheritance to be divided among the other children. It was a will that encouraged Jacob’s progeny to find someone Jewish, fast. Aunt Helen fell in love with a Catholic named Vance, but she married a Jew. Aunt Harriet dropped out of high school and married four days after she turned eighteen. When my father married at twenty, he was Ethel’s last child to wed. That’s what she was waiting for. Seven days later she married her boyfriend, Charles Wolf. The name Volk means people, or folk, in German. But in Russian, Volk means wolf. Ethel Volk Volk. Ethel Wolf Wolf. Ethel Volk Wolf. Ethel Wolf Volk.
Jake was no stranger to control-from-the-grave wills. Reb Sussel’s was a tontine, a system of money dispersal introduced by a Neapolitan banker named Lorenzo Tonti to France in the seventeenth century. In a tontine money is shared equally among a group of people, but as each person dies, what’s left of his or her share is divided among the survivors. When Sussman died, he left equal shares in the deli to his six remaining children. But as each Volk child died, they could not leave their shares to their own families. Their shares reverted to their siblings. I don’t know who Reb Sussel’s last surviving child was. But a few years ago I wrote an essay that mentioned the deli, and the phone rang. A woman I’d never heard of introduced herself. “I’m Cecil Joseph’s daughter,” she said.
“Oh!” I said. “You must be Annie Volk Joseph’s granddaughter!”
We talked for a few minutes about the family. Then she said, “Listen. You know the key money from the deli? It’s still in escrow, but my father’s mother was the last remaining child from that generation, so I hope you’re not going to give me a hard time about it.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“No,” she said.
“How much?” I asked.
Softly she hung up the phone.
My grandmother tried to run the Jacob Volk Wrecking and Shoring Company herself. It went under fast. Meanwhile, Jake’s brother prospered with the Albert A. Volk House Wrecking & Excavating Company and the Albert A. Volk Building Materials Corporation. In his spare time, Albert A. (for Abba) wrote letters to the
New York Times
about Churchill and Roosevelt, letters urging the amendment of the Wagner Act, increased tree planting on city streets, prolonged war on Germany, and fear of black cats. The
Times
published dozens of letters. Then they published the rebuttals. Then they published Albert’s rebuttals to the rebuttals. Heated letters went back and forth. Eventually a
Times
reporter knocked on Albert’s door.
HERE’S ONE READER WHO LIKES WRITING—ALBERT VOLK’S LETTERS TO EDITORS ON PROBLEMS OF THE DAY ARE HIS MAIN PLEASURE, the headline read.
“You think I’m a crackpot?” Albert asked the reporter. “Well, maybe I am. But what is a crackpot? It is anyone who is cracked about different things than you are cracked on.”
The interview appeared on October 4, 1948, but part of my copy has been excised. I go to the microfilm room at the New York Public Library. Someone in the family has neatly removed the following: “He was ousted from two public schools and finally quit the third at the age of 13 to work for a hymn writer. Five weeks later he was discharged for suggesting a rhyme to go with ‘Jesus with faltering feet.’ ” The interview ends with Albert’s saying, “I can’t help laughing to myself. Me and my silk hat. I came here in steerage and I have attained Fifth Avenue. I get a big laugh out of that.”