The Secret Wire Around Manhattan
Plus! Turkey Poll! Too much the thank yous!!!
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #188 of CAFÉ ANNE!
First, in anticipation of the upcoming holiday, let’s discuss turkey. It’s important to get a lot of protein at Thanksgiving dinner, at least if you’re a Kadet, so you can win the Family Book Club discussion that follows.
To make dinner more affordable, check out this survey from The Locavore Guide of rates for a pound of turkey at shops around town.
Spoiler: the cheapest, at $1.99 a pound, is the Lil’ Butterball at Food Bazaar. The average price city-wide is $3.12, meanwhile, and the most expensive is the Fossil Farms turkey at O. Ottomanelli & Sons on Bleeker Street for $5.89 per pound. It’s raised in a classic six on Park Avenue!
This all inspired me, of course, to create a special holiday poll:
Please explain your response in the comments.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, I usually update readers on the State of the Newsletter when an anniversary rolls around. But this year, when the date came up in October, I clean forgot. So now, to celebrate FOUR YEARS of CAFÉ ANNE, some stat-based gratitude:
• Thank you to all 18,000 subscribers! As long-time readers know, CAFÉ ANNE launched in 2021 to a mailing list of 70—mostly family and friends—and I’m very pleased by how it’s grown, and how much fun it’s been.
• Thank you even more to the 460 paid subscribers. As you know, CAFÉ ANNE has no paywalls and never will. If it weren’t for the 2.5% of readers who generously pay for something they could read for free, I wouldn’t be able to keep this thing going for everyone.
• Huge thanks to the 327 Substack newsletters that recommend CAFÉ ANNE to their readers—it’s the biggest source of new subscribers by far.
• A lot of the best ideas come from readers, so thank you to everyone who contributed feature ideas this past year including stories about the Museum of Interesting Things, NYC’s Viking cafés, the 3,100-mile marathon, NYC’s Friendliest Subway Conductor, Larry the Shoe Man, Lenny’s Creations, Brooklyn’s Most Confusing Storefront and the very popular Ranking of NYC’s Secret Bathrooms.
• Thanks to my adventure pals who accompanied me on reporting trips this year and made the outings even more fun: Aaron B., my awesome neighbor Shelly, Paul L., Chris D., Jack A., Phil K. (my favorite brother!) and of course, my “friend” Aharon.
• The comments that come in after I publish on Monday every week always have me laughing out loud and feeling so delighted. The regulars (you know who you are!) are such an absurd, thoughtful and funny bunch. Thank you for being so weird.
• Thanks to Lucy Stafford, who contributes her very charming paintings (for free!) on a regular basis to illustrate the newsletter—saving us all from the dreadful banality of AI art. (With the exception of this week, but that’s only because I screwed up and forgot to send her my request.)
• Thanks to everyone who sent Venmo contributions to fund adventures I otherwise could not afford including my AI robot massage and $28 coffee.
• And finally, thanks to Eric Adams, NYC’s first AI-generated mayor, who provided so much wonderful fodder over the past four years for Eric Adams Watch. If you’re interested, Mr. Adams, there is a job waiting for you in my administration.
I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve got a Manhattan ride-along with the man who may have NYC’s strangest job. Please enjoy.
Regards!
Anne
PS: I’m taking a week off to dig a tunnel between Central Park and Prospect Park. Next issue drops Monday December 8 (featuring, at last, NYC’s worst bagel)!
FEATURE
The Secret Wire Around Manhattan
I recently learned that the Island of Manhattan is encircled by a 25-mile wire enclosure that makes it okay to carry your keys in your pocket on Saturdays.
It’s called the Manhattan Eruv, and it was first erected—circling a much smaller area on the Upper West Side—by Orthodox Jews in 1999 when they created a 20-block enclosure by stringing fishing line between lamp posts.
According to Jewish law, it’s forbidden to carry items such as keys, cash or even tissues outside the home on the Sabbath—that counts as working! But if you erect an eruv around your community, everything inside the boundary is considered a private space. You can carry a cake or push a baby carriage through the streets without breaking the Sabbath.
I first read about the Manhattan Eruv in Eden Seiferheld’s Big City, Little Friend newsletter. Her account included a fun fact. “Every Thursday, a rabbi drives the entire perimeter of the eruv to make sure the line is intact, and their website assures us that the line’s been fine since ‘99!” she wrote.
Whoa! Who was this rabbi who drove around the island every week to inspect the eruv? I had to get myself a ride-along!
A Google search led to the official Manhattan Eruv website, which led to an email exchange with the eruv’s co-president, Rabbi Adam Mintz. While he wasn’t the fellow who did the inspections, he said he could arrange a tour with the man who does, Rabbi Moshe Tauber—who lives upstate in Monsey and hasn’t missed an inspection in 26 years. But there was a catch. Well, two.
The first: To avoid traffic, Rabbi Tauber conducts the inspection every Thursday morning at 5 am. We’d have to meet before dawn. Fine with me! I’m an early bird.
The second stipulation was a bit trickier.
“He doesn’t like going with a woman,” Rabbi Mintz wrote. “Do you have a man you could bring along?”
I’d been wondering about that. Orthodox Jews have many restrictions around co-mingling the sexes—they even have separate sections for men and women in their synagogues.
“Hmmm,” I replied. “I don’t think I’ll be able to find someone to come along. What if I rode in the back seat, and covered myself from head to toe?”
After further back and forth, we devised a solution—I’d sit in the back seat, and Rabbi Tauber would bring his wife!
I was excited for the ride-along. But first I did a little research. There are more than 1,000 eruvim around the world, I learned, including more than two dozen in NYC serving its roughly 400,000 Orthodox Jews. There’s even one encircling my own neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, maintained by a local synagogue.
And it’s serious business. At an annual convention, the City Eruv Conference, eruv supervisors from around the globe gather to talk shop. This year’s two-day event, at the Edison, NJ Sheridan, featured a dozen workshops with titles such as “Ladder Safety” and “Finding the Best Eruv String.”
I also enjoyed a video chat with Rabbi Mintz. He’s not only the founder of an Orthodox congregation on the Upper West Side, he’s one of the world’s foremost experts on eruvim—he did his doctoral dissertation on the subject and wrote a book, Building Communities, A History of the Eruv in America, which one reviewer described as, “rather accessible given the topic’s dense legal history.”
Eruvim go back to Roman Palestine in 100 AD, Rabbi Mintz told me, and came to the US about 100 years ago. The Manhattan Eruv, which expanded over time to include most of the borough, incorporates a combination of fishing line and publicly maintained walls and fences such the guard rails running along the Hudson River.
It costs about $200,000 a year for local synagogues to maintain, and no taxpayer money is involved. “I’m happy to give you a website where people can make donations,” Rabbi Mintz offered. “It’s not cheap!”
I also asked Rabbi Mintz about Rabbi Tauber, the inspector I’d be joining for the ride-along. “How would you describe his personality?” I asked.
“Very friendly, but very orthodox,” said Rabbi Mintz.
“What does that mean?” I wondered.
“You’ll see!” he said. “He and his wife sit in the front seat, and you’ll sit in the back seat, and they’re very orthodox. I don’t need to explain. You’ll see!”
Because Rabbi Tauber was bringing his wife, he was starting his weekly inspection even earlier than usual—we agreed he’d pick me up at the Staten Island Ferry terminal at midnight.
When the hour arrived, Rabbi Tauber and his wife Chaya pulled up to the curb in the worn, 12-passenger minibus they use for the daycare they run out of their home in Monsey, a largely Orthodox community in Rockland County.
They were dressed in standard Hasidic garb (a wig and long skirt for Mrs. Tauber, covered heads for both), and occasionally conferred in Yiddish, talking over each other as they answered my questions.
They have a very large family (they wouldn’t say how many kids), and both work at their day care. Rabbi Tauber also teaches Talmud to high school boys at a local Yeshiva.
The eruv gig is a side job, and Rabbi Tauber hasn’t missed a weekly inspection in 26 years. Every Friday, after repairs, he sends a text message to the synagogues that rely on the eruv: “The eruv is up, good Shabbos!”
The synagogues, in turn, update their congregations. “If it’s down, God forbid, and I hope this should never happen again, they put that on their web site,” said Rabbi Tauber.
So far, the eruv has only failed once. That was 15 years ago. A heavy Friday snowstorm made it impossible for contractors to get in with their trucks and make repairs. “You could walk outside, but you couldn’t push a baby carriage,” said Rabbi Tauber, as we cruised up Water Street. “You couldn’t take keys outside your house.”
Among the first stops on our inspection—Manhattan Bridge Plaza, a complicated snarl of on-ramps that required some ingenious eruvanical (is that a word?) strategizing.
A bridge is like an opening within the enclosure, said Rabbi Tauber, “So we need to close it off.”
But not every bridge. “The Brooklyn Bridge doesn’t need that because of the way that it’s built,” he said. “It has overhead beams that are considered a boundary. Sometimes they know how to build it, sometimes they don’t. The Williamsburg was almost built the right way, but we had to add something.”
We got out of the van to inspect the area at the end of Canal Street. Rabbi Tauber pointed out the lines strung between lamp posts. I didn’t see anything in the dark.
“I’m telling you, my husband sees things that I don’t,” said Mrs. Tauber. “But with the sensors, it’s a little easier.”
Ah, that’s right! The sensors. Reader, there is an eruv revolution underway—right here in NYC.
This fall, the world’s first electronic eruv monitoring system was launched, with the Manhattan Eruv serving as the guinea pig. It uses 142 sensors mounted on the line and tethered to nearby lamp posts. When a wire snaps—which happens several times a month—the sensor sends an email alert.
The system was invented by Jerry Kestenbaum, founder and CEO of Aware Buildings, a Manhattan business that provides leak-detection sensor systems to high-rise apartment buildings. He can talk for a long time about sensor technology if you let him!
Mr. Kestenbaum said he started the project when he learned that Rabbi Tauber hadn’t had a vacation in decades. “I said, ‘That doesn’t seem fair!’” Mr. Kestenbaum recalled. “Aside from the fact that it doesn’t seem efficient. There has to be a better way.”
He spent two years fiddling with gadgets in his apartment, designing a solar-powered system that could be easily deployed. The sensors were installed in September, and so far, so good. It works!
“It’s interesting to me that it’s 2025, and no one’s done this before,” I said.
“There’s a lot of things no one’s done before,” said Mr. Kestenbaum.
The inventor, who donated the system, said he hopes his technology spreads to eruvim around the globe. But it won’t happen fast. It’s a very conservative culture!
“I think next year, we’ll add maybe three more eruvs,” said Mr. Kestenbaum.
You may wonder why, with nearly one million Jewish people in NYC, they need Rabbi Tauber to drive down every week from the Catskills to inspect the eruv.
“You got to know the laws, it’s a big study,” said the rabbi, as we cruised up the West Side Highway.
There is, in fact, an entire volume of the Talmud—more than 200 pages—covering technical and legal issues relating to eruvim. Rabbi Tauber studied it for years.
The area around the UN, for example, isn’t included in the safe zone. Jewish law dictates that an eruv can’t be erected without permission from the mayor of the town, and the UN is not city property.
A city-owned fence can be considered part of the eruv, meanwhile, but it must be at least 39 inches tall. Rabbi Tauber showed me how eruv supervisors extended the Jersey barriers along some stretches of highway with top rails so they’d be tall enough to qualify.
And because the city keeps changing, the eruv must be updated continually. Rabbi Tauber pointed out a block on 11th Avenue where the eruv has been temporarily rerouted across the street due to a construction project.
Knowing that Orthodox Jews don’t use the internet except for business and religious purposes, I asked if they’d ever use AI to assist the effort.
“AI is never going to make any decision on Jewish law,” said Rabbi Tauber. “You can’t ask AI about Jewish law!”
“Okay,” I said, “but would you ever use AI for anything? Would you use ChatGPT?”
“What is that?” he said.
I was curious, of course, if Rabbi Tauber enjoys the weekly inspection trip. Mrs. Tauber answered for him. He loves the job, she said, because it gives him much-needed time to himself: “It’s a job you can do on your own time.”
Rabbi Tauber uses the time to call his son, a fellow teacher who lives in Brazil, or to dial into a phone line maintained by Orthodox Jews that offers prerecorded lectures. He pressed a speed dial on his flip phone to demonstrate: “Hello and Welcome to the Torah Broadcasting System!” said a voice.
And while the job pays well (he won’t say how much), there’s also the satisfaction of making it easier for folks to observe the Sabbath. Mrs. Tauber grew up in the Hassidic section of Williamsburg before it installed an eruv in 1981.
“We used to go out and then all of the sudden I felt, ‘Oh I have something, I have money in my pocket.’ We used to drop money on the street in the middle of the Shabbos,” she recalled. “And we lost it. It could have been $10, $20, anything. We’d drop it. No Jew would ever walk with anything.”
“What happens if you don’t observe the Sabbath?” I wondered.
Mrs. Tauber inhaled sharply.
“The worst thing a person can do is not observing the Sabbath,” said Rabbi Tauber. “Well, it’s hard to say ‘worse’, because everything is worse. In Jewish law, there is no cutting corners.”
I wondered if the eruv around Brooklyn Heights keeps me from breaking the Sabbath when I carry keys outside the apartment building.
The answer: no. I couldn’t break the Sabbath, even if I wanted to, because I’m not Jewish.
Still, when the rabbi and his wife dropped me off at the corner of Broadway and 159th Street at 2:30 am before heading back upstate, I felt a strange happiness knowing of this nearly invisible boundary transforming the island into a private space. Manhattan, it seems, was intact for another week.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Fall in NYC is the best. Every human should experience all three days of it at least once.”
-Austin Rief
CAFÉ ANNE is a free weekly newsletter created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday.
Excuse me! Where is the NO turkey choice?!
Eruvim are classically inconspicuous. I've long been fascinated by them, so I *loved* this story -- great job, Anne!