URBAN TACTICS; Where Are the Knishes of Yesteryear?
TO this day, whenever my mother sits down on a beach, she makes the same joke. ”Where’s the knish man?” she asks, knowing full well that there isn’t a beach left in America that serves piping-hot mashed potatoes to sunbathers. Annie Hauck-Lawson, a professor of food and nutrition at Brooklyn College, laughed when she heard this. ”I remember them too,” she said. ”My family and I used to sit on the beach at Coney Island, near the parachute jump — that was the Polish section — and there would be these men walking around with brown shopping bags, yelling: ‘Hot knishes! Ice cold soda!”’ I myself wouldn’t expect to find the knish man in Coney Island. I know things have changed considerably since my mother was strapping on water wings. I did, however, expect to find knishes on the streets of Manhattan, and when I didn’t, I got worried. It started innocently enough. One day, in the mood for a knish, I approached a hot-dog cart and placed my order. The vendor told me he was out of them,
