Opening of Model East Side House Recalls Jewish Founder

Aaron Rabinowitz, one of the founders and vice-president of the Real Estate Exchange and a member of the State Board of Housing, who, together with Lieutenant-Governor Herbert H. Lehman had conceived the plan of model housing on the East Side, has now the satisfaction of seeing the project in successful operation. The new cooperative apartment house, in the heart of the lower East Side, occupying two square blocks and sponsored by the State Board of Housing, welcomed its first tenants yesterday.

Aaron Rabinowitz has now realized a dream he fostered many years ago, when, out of the squalor of the East Side which was his childhood home, he emerged to make his way in the world. The year 1923 found him head of Spear & Company, and it was not many years later that his great capacity for work and his absorption in real estate values won him the authoritative position of advisor and judge of real estate property. The proper assumption was that he became rich with enough to retire and for that reason turned Spear & Co. over to his two brothers. But the actual reason was that now Aaron Rabinowitz was in a position to realize his dream. If he was going to see a model apartment house, livable, clean, roomy, airy, built for the convenience of the lower East Side residents, he must devote himself completely to the task at hand, and as a consequence, Spear & Co. was consigned to the attention of his brothers.

It was Mr. Rabinowitz’s eloquence at a meeting of prominent personalities in Governor Roosevelt’s offices that inspired Lieutenant Governor Lehman to go “fifty-fifty” on the project with the understanding that he was not interested if it would be a “profit-making” proposition.