A story about New York's Second Avenue Deli, on the fabled Lower East Side, and how the real estate market might do what the neighborhood's exodus of Jews couldn't do.

An excerpt from the Jan. 6 NYT story:

The Second Avenue Deli has survived turbulence and tragedy in its 51 years. The decline of the Jewish enclave on the Lower East Side did not kill it. The broad-daylight murder of its beloved founder, Abe Lebewohl, in a robbery in 1996 shut it down but briefly.

Dietary fashion campaigns against artery-clogging fare like brick-thick pastrami sandwiches and fat-saturated potato latkes seemed only to make the lines of defiant fans longer.

But the deli seems to have met its match in that implacable beast, the real estate market.

On Sunday, facing a $9,000 increase in his $24,000-a-month base rent, the deli's owner, Jack Lebewohl, Abe's brother, pulled down the grates on the glimmering restaurant at East 10th Street and Second Avenue. The closing was described as temporary, but Mr. Lebewohl said yesterday that the next time the place opens it might very well be to clear out.

The rent increase is actually built into the lease that Mr. Lebewohl negotiated with the previous owners 15 years ago. The new owners have volunteered to come down $3,000 in the new rent, but no further.

"If I don't get this resolved in x number of days," Mr. Lebewohl said, "I'll vacate." He declined to say what "x" equaled but implied that it was a one-digit number. "Less than weeks," he said.

And so the mourning has begun.

"It's almost like wiping out Carnegie Hall," said the comic Jackie Mason, whose $10,000 reward for the capture of Abe Lebewohl's killer remains unclaimed. "A sandwich to a Jew is just as important as a country to a Gentile."

To Joan Washington, a community activist who has been going to the deli since shortly after running away from home at age 15 in search of the radical life on the East Side, the deli was about a lot more than a sandwich.

"It's not just a pastrami palace," said Ms. Washington, who is now 58. "It's the history of Lower East Side Judaism."

For the Torontonians who pop in to this blog from time to time, my mom's first apartment in Toronto in the late 1940s was on Spadina Avenue just north of Grossman's Tavern.

As such, she lived across from Kensington Market, which was heavily Jewish in those days (there's still a synagogue on St. Andrew St., just west of Spadina).

One day in July 1990, when I popped into Toronto for a visit from out west, a place called Switzer's, the last remaining Jewish deli on Spadina, closed its doors for good.

You'd really have to look to see evidence of the Jewish presence that once flourished on Spadina (the Bagel, a half-block west of Spadina on College, used to offer some Jewish food, but it underwent a change in ownership).  When my mom came for a visit this fall, I took her for brunch to the Free Times Cafe on College at Major, which offers a Jewish brunch on Sundays, complete with live music. "They're playing music from when I went to summer camp!" mom said with delight about the Russian folk songs being played that day (they also do klezmer).

But neighborhoods change. It's the same thing with Queen West -- from Augusta westward, it was Little Ukraine in the 1950s, but how would you know that now?

One glossy bar has kept the name of a legendary east European sausage shop -- Czechkowski's, now out on the Queensway  in Etobicoke; my grandmother reportedly shopped at the original. The Prague also offers a link to the past, but otherwise, only the Ukrainian Baptist Church south of Queen W. at Tecumseth hints at the nabe's previous inhabitants.

OTOH, that's life in the big city.

Once upon a time, say 20 years ago, College Street in the Little Italy area was known as the place in Toronto to come and buy shoes.

"You know what they're gonna say 20 years from now?" I told a few people. "They're gonna say: '20 years ago, College was filled with martini bars, but nowadays, all we have is shoe stores!'" :)