Hurwitz Mintz announces its closing

Dear Friends,

The closing of old New Orleans businesses affects me with such disproportionate sadness. Mother tries to console me with words like, “It is only a store. No one is demolishing the Cabildo or The Napoleon House.”

Yet when Mother entered my room this morning to inform me that Hurwitz Mintz is closing, I felt the same peculiar ache I experienced when Adler's closed and when M. Goldbergs disappeared, an ache that returns whenever I am forced to buy casual menswear and remember that M. Goldbergs once existed. It does not help that we did not get one last meal in the Zodiac Room at the original Neiman Marcus before its closure this week.

Perhaps this is because I have always had difficulty distinguishing the places of New Orleans from the people who inhabited them, and the people from the memories I have attached to them. A store was never merely a store to me. It was where Grandmother took me for a Saturday outing, where my parents shopped, where my grandparents had shopped, where some long-forgotten New Orleanian had stood before me, and where, for reasons I often cannot articulate, I still feel that some portion of my family is waiting.

These old business meant something and their owners were willing to put their names behind them. The business was an extension of who they were. It was not a 9 to 5 job for them. The business was their calling and it was what I always believed was the American Dream, which has been whittled away by descendants that enjoyed the comforts of the dream without the duty and drive that created it. Now nameless stores like Pottery Barn, Rooms to Go, and Arhaus, stores that lack any connection to the past, replace the family named anchors that connect us to our ancestors.

For my family, Hurwitz Mintz is older than my own memory of it. Great Grandfather was a friend of the Hurwitz family and helped them during their early years in New Orleans. Out of gratitude, Mr. Hurwitz gave Great Grandfather a very special desk chair rumored to have been clad in a blue silk originally. Years later, Grandmother gave that chair to me. It was leather by that time, and I still have it, although it has been reupholstered twice during my ownership.

There is something wonderful about this chair I sit in right now as I type to you, my friends. I have spent a substantial portion of my life sitting, reading, and writing in this chair, a chair that carries the history of Hurwitz Mintz. I sadly did not ponder and appreciate its history until this morning. We are miserable creatures in our fallen natures, and we lack the courage and gratitude and attention to see God’s blessing in every space of life.

Hurwitz Mintz itself belongs to the great Russian-Jewish story of New Orleans. Although there is little today that would suggest a bias against Russian Jews in the city, when Abraham Mintz arrived from Russia in 1910 with three dollars and no English, he arrived to a place that was not welcoming of Russian Jews, and that included the Jews who had arrived a generation or two earlier from what would become Germany. But Great Grandfather was no respecter of title or nationality and befriended Abraham and helped get him a job as a furniture merchant. It was not a glorious job, but it was how many Jews in that time got their feet in the door.

His son, Joseph Hurwitz, used his father’s connections as a foundation and with the help of his brother in law, Morris Mintz, established the business in 1923 on Royal Street. Years later, after a visit to James Cohen’s coin shop, I was lifted on the shoulders of a unicycling busker not far from the original location, where Mother bought me a beautiful marble obelisk. When Mother refused to allow me to go on a fishing trip with Cousin in the late 90s I threw that obelisk against my wall. It was not my finest moment and is the reason it no longer is in my room with my chair.

Hurwitz Mintz may well have been the greatest Russian-Jewish retail institution New Orleans produced. And now it is going. I cannot but think this is at least partially the result of the recent death of Morris Mintz’s grandson, Mitchel, whose family history in New Orleans did include, at Galatoire’s, a rather unfortunate deviation from the customary etiquette of the ladies’ table. Desperation and desuetude drive the dream. Comfort and complacency conspire to consume and crush it.

I cannot help thinking of Adler's, which survived for more than 125 years, and of M. Goldbergs, whose closing still creates in me a melancholy whenever I need to find something as mundane as a pair of casual trousers. I think of all the places that once made New Orleans feel comprehensible, places where you did not have to wonder whether the city still possessed the thing you remembered because the thing was simply there.

The comparison that haunts me is New York's Jewish deli. During Mother’s lifetime, there were roughly 1,500 Jewish delis in New York. Today there are only about twenty. Imagine being born into a city in which 1,500 such places existed and living long enough to see almost all of them disappear. At some point the question ceases to be where one can get a good pastrami sandwich. The question becomes what happened to the civilization that required 1,500 places to sell it?

New Orleans, no, our world, is experiencing its own diminishment.

One by one, the names become memories.

I look at my chair and think about Great Grandfather and a family of Russian Jewish immigrants who came to New Orleans and built something that lasted more than a century.

And I suppose that is why this hurts so much. I am not really mourning the disappearance of a furniture store. I am mourning another piece of the New Orleans that made my family possible, and the increasingly uncomfortable realization that the world I remember is becoming something that must be reconstructed from chairs, photographs, stories and a floor mosaic before doors that no longer open.

Yours,
TulaneLSU