DILL PICKLE CLUB – PERFECT PICKLE FUNDRAISER – 2/7/11

TWO MINUTE HISTORY STORY BY SARAH MIRK

There was once a little old chain-smoking Jewish lady in Portland who

was beloved for her pickles. Her name was Mrs. Neushin and she lived in a

funny white house on SW College Street which has two front pillars and a

boxy shape. It’s still there today, between fourth and fifth avenue, though

now it sticks out like an abandoned thumb, surrounded by parking lots and

tall apartment buildings. The one hundred and thirty one year old home is

now a Mediterranean restaurant run by an Egyptian man named Hassan who

I’m told makes excellent $6 falafel. But that’s a different story.

Before the 1950s, South Portland was a strongly Jewish neighborhood.

And it was a neighborhood, cute yards, vegetable gardens, tiny houses close

together, five synagogues, three Jewish bagel makers. Mrs. Neushin made

pickles in her basement in large wooden barrels. According to an old man

who was young at the time, Mrs. Neushin and a group of female friends were

often seen sitting on the porch of the white house, peeling garlic. When the

brine was ready in the basement, Mrs. Neushin would “conscript the

homeless and wayfarers from Burnside to roll the barrels up and down the

sidewalk in front of the house in order to properly mix the pickles.”

Another Portlander remembers heading into Mrs. Neushin’s basement

with his parents to buy pickles—what he remembers most vividly is not the

pickles, but the cigarette clinging perpetually to her lip as she mixed the

brine and doled out the pickles.

The joke was that Mrs. Neushin’s secret ingredient wasn’t any garlic or

vinegar but the ash from her cigarettes.

But during the 1950s, the city decided that the mostly low-income,

Italian, Jewish, black neighborhood was blighted—it had a higher crime rate

than the rest of downtown and the houses looked old and dilapated

compared to the new modern city center popping up. A report in 1961 said

that the area would better serve the city if it wasn’t a neighborhood of homes

and bakers and pickle makers, but was instead a bunch of mix-use stores,

shops and offices. So over the next two years, the city used $12 million in

federal money to basically raze the whole neighborhood and “renew” it from

scratch. The Portland Development Commission demolished 445 buildings

and relocated 1,573 citizens. Mrs. Neushin’s house is one of the few old

homes still standing.

After Mrs. Neushin died, another pickle maker, Steinfelds, bought out

her label—but reportedly not her recipe. These days, the cucumbers

themselves are grown in India. But that’s a different story.