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Streit’s Matzo Tenements Sell for $30.5M

50,000 sq. ft. NYC operation is last family-owned matzo factory in the U.S.

by
Jonathan Zalman
May 12, 2015
Alan Adler, owner of Streit’s Matzo factory, May 9, 2012. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)
Alan Adler, owner of Streit’s Matzo factory, May 9, 2012. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

Streit’s Matzo factory, located over four tenement buildings (148-154 Rivington St.) on New York’s Lower East Side, has been on and off the the market for seven years. According to The Real Deal, in 2008, the 50,000 sq. ft. facility was listed at $25 million, but it never sold; one year later it was re-listed at the same price only to produce a similar result.

But in January, an unnamed real estate firm entered into a contract to buy the factory from the Streit family—their factory is last family-owned matzo factory in the U.S.—for an undisclosed amount. Yesterday The Real Deal announced that “Midtown East-based Cogswell Realty closed on the acquisition of Streit’s Matzo Factory…for $30.5 million, according to property records filed with the city.”

In January, Tablet Deputy Editor Stephanie Butnick wrote about the historical context of the factory’s sale:

Vox Tablet headed to the iconic matzoh institution during Passover in 2008 to document the factory during its busy season, thinking it might be the factory’s last—you can listen to the dispatch here.



Michael Green, who has been chronicling Streit’s Matzo for an upcoming documentary, wrote about the factory’s closure in Bowery Boogie: “For the Jewish community nationwide and for the descendants of immigrants of all backgrounds whose families passed through neighborhood over the course of the last century or who remain here, it is the loss of a connection to a Lower East Side that is ever more the domain of museums and memory than of daily life.”

The factory, which produces 16,000 pounds of unleavened bread every day, will reportedly move to New Jersey. In 2007, Streit’s was reported to own a 40 percent market share of matzo sales in the U.S.

Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.