Christodora

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By the time Christodora House settlement erected its handsomely simple new sixteen-story brick tower on the corner of Avenue B and Ninth Street in 1928—an edifice that loomed over Tompkins Square Park and the surrounding blocks of humble tenements — the Traums had long left the Lower East Side. They were part of that first wave of worldly German Jews who had come to New York City in the early or mid-nineteenth century. Those sedate, self-conscious Jews had slowly migrated uptown as the old neighborhood became crowded with their dirt-poor eastern European cousins, Jews who spoke Yiddish and held to embarrassing old traditions, such as separating men and women at temple. Around the time that WASPs were raising money to fund the new Christodora building, which aimed to civilize these shtetl children and their equally wild-haired Catholic immigrant peers, Felix Traum, an investment banker, was already playing a leading role in the building of the new Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in midtown, a limestone Romanesque pile that would become the most prestigious synagogue in America. Accordingly, Felix had moved his family to the Upper East Side, where they lived in a not-opulent but still very capacious apartment not far from the Ochses of the New York Times.

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