When Cohen’s grandfather Morris “Moishe” Cohen returned from fighting in World War II, he and his brother-in-law, also a veteran, ran the store. “The story goes that it was at the urging of Mitchell’s great-aunt Jenny, who was a kid at the time, that the family opened a pushcart selling candy outside.” It became a full-fledged candy shop in the late 1930s because, in the depths of the Great Depression, sweets were a better bet than shoe repairs. “Depending on who you ask, it was either King’s Shoes or Economy Shoes,” she said. And before it was a candy store, it was a shoe and hat repair business. Before the shop moved to its current location at 108 Rivington Street in the early ’80s, she said, it was half a block away at the corner of Rivington and Essex Streets. Greenfield Cohen, who is married to Cohen, is also one of the keepers of the family history. As is true of so many New York food institutions piloted by third- and even fourth-generation shopkeepers - among them the appetizing emporium Russ & Daughters, the Italian specialty store Di Palo’s and the German butcher shop Schaller & Weber - Economy Candy has largely been kept up and running, its traditions maintained, because of the passion and energy of its young proprietors. (He said it’s how he got good at math.) After a detour into the finance world following college, he came back to the store. As a child, he loved standing on a milk crate behind the counter and making change for customers. “But we only had three bars left so we said we were sorry but they were for someone else.” I thanked him as if he had set aside the last tins of a rare caviar.Ĭohen, whose parents, Jerry and Ilene Cohen, ran the shop before him, grew up here. “Somebody came in asking for Turkish Taffy just yesterday,” Cohen told me. Because this is a shop that stocks so much vintage candy, Cohen and Greenfield Cohen are always under siege by sentimental regulars. The last time I stopped by, on a cold December day, was by this measure a triumph: The owners, Mitchell Cohen, 36, and Skye Greenfield Cohen, 32, had saved me some Bonomo Turkish Taffy. Dating to 1937, it sells not only a vast array of sweets - as many as 2,000 different kinds, according to its proprietors, from licorice to chocolate, root beer barrels to jelly beans - but also the nostalgia that comes with finding your favorite childhood treat. It is sometimes said that the oldest extant shop of its kind in New York City is Economy Candy on Rivington Street. In this series for T, the author Reggie Nadelson revisits New York institutions that have defined cool for decades, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
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