The Lower East Side Is In A Pickle

The Great Lower East Side Pickle War
By Sewell Chan

Even as the beloved, traditional Jewish food establishments of the Lower East Side seem to be locked into an irrecoverable downward spiral — the death of Gertel’s bakery being the most recent example — a war has been raging over who is the legitimate heir to the Guss’s pickle empire that once ruled over Essex Street. It is a war that evokes the fractious pushcart vendors on Hester Street — where Izzy Guss, a Russian émigré, founded his pickle business in the 1910s — but is now conducted against a backdrop of the modern-day, gentrified, luxury-condo-dominated neighborhood.

Izzy Guss just might be turning over in his grave.

Let’s recap some of the basics of this war, as Cara Buckley recounted last November.
Mr. Guss died in 1975. His store, which opened in 1920 on Hester Street and eventually moved to Essex Street, was sold to Harold Baker, whose son, Tim, a pickle apprentice and now master, eventually took over the business.

Guss’s Pickles had a longstanding relationship with the Leibowitz family — the patriarch Max, a son David, a grandson Stephen and now a great-grandson Andrew — who supplied the pickles and now co-own United Pickle Products in the Bronx. It is reputedly the largest family-owned pickle wholesaler on the East Coast.

In 2002, Andrew N. Leibowitz opened a Guss’s Pickles shop in Cedarhurst, N.Y. His father, Stephen A. Leibowitz, who calls himself chief pickle maven of United Pickle and supplies his son’s shop, says the family bought the rights to Guss’s Pickles from Mr. Baker. The family trademarked the name Guss’s Pickles that year.

Mr. Baker continued to run a Lower East Side store until 2004, when he decided to get out of the business to care for his ailing mother. Stephen Leibowitz says his family turned down an offer from Mr. Baker to buy the store.

In came Patricia Fairhurst, who bought the lease to the store — now on Orchard Street — and continued to use the name Guss’s Pickles. (Both she and the Leibowitz family actually use the name Guss’ Pickles, preserving the original punctuation and omitting the final S.)

Ms. Fairhurst and the Leibowitz family got along at first; she used the Guss name and bought the family’s pickles. That suddenly changed, according to the Leibowitzes, in 2006, when Ms. Fairhurst decided to buy her pickles from another supplier. The Leibowitzes asserted that she would have to stop using the Guss name. They set up a Guss’s Pickles Web site that asserts that theirs are the only true Guss’s Pickles.

Ms. Fairhurst retaliated by filing a federal lawsuit in which she denied she was infringing on any trademark. She accused the Leibowitzes of unfair competition and “tortious interference.” The Leibowitz family, in answering the lawsuit, denied the accusations. The Leibowitzes also filed a counterclaim asserting that they have the exclusive right to the Guss’s Pickles trademark.

Ms. Fairhurst has recently gone on a public relations offensive. In a New York Post article today, she criticized Whole Foods Market — including its newest branch, on Bowery in the Lower East Side — for carrying the Leibowitzes’ pickles. “They never came from me,” Ms. Fairhurst told The Post. “I am Guss’s Pickles.”

Not so, says Stephen Leibowitz. “She did not buy Guss’s Pickles,” he said in a phone interview. “She bought a pickle stand.”

For now, Whole Foods is standing by the Leibowitzes. “We’ve always carried these pickles, for many, many years,” said Fred Shank, a spokesman for the supermarket chain. “We believe we are selling the original Guss’s Pickles.”

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, meanwhile, seems to be siding with Ms. Fairhurst. It has a Web page that is devoted to the fabled eateries of the neighborhood and that characterizes Ms. Fairhurst as the heir to the Guss tradition.
(Daniel Arnheim, a spokesman for the museum, says the Web site “was part of an ongoing series of articles meant to support and promote good will among local merchants.” He said in an e-mail message: “We’re not taking sides and don’t wish to be presented as taking sides in this dispute. … It was not intended as endorsing one purveyor vs. another.”)

Meanwhile — as if this could possibly get more complicated — a third pickle business, The Pickle Guys, was started in 2003 by Alan Kaufman and other former employees of Guss’s Pickles. They were dismayed that the original business had left Essex Street, its home for so many years. Mr. Kaufman’s Web site boasts, “Today we are the only pickle store that exists on Essex Street.”

All three businesses — Andrew Leibowitz’s Guss’s Pickles of Cedarhurst, N.Y.; Patricia Fairhurst’s Guss’s Pickles of Orchard Street; and Alan Kaufman’s Pickle Guys of Essex Street — say they sell rabbinically supervised kosher pickles. All are closed on Saturdays in observance of the Jewish Sabbath. All claim that their recipes are faithful to the traditions of Izzy Guss.

Take your pick.