The Streit’s Matzo Factory was Acquired for $30.5M

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The deal is done.

Streit’s Matzo officially unloaded its historic 90-year-old factory on Rivington Street for a hefty $30.5 million, according to the deed filed with the city today. The buyer is none other than Cogswell Realty, a midtown-based real estate firm that specializes in “flying under the radar” with its property acquisitions. Ergo, expect some massive development here.

We first broke news that Streit’s was cashing out back in January when the two parties officially entered into contract. Contract was officially signed on April 30. The sale had less to do with the pressures of gentrification, we’re told, and more to do with competing in the current economic climate.  Running the tenement factory is no longer economically feasible in the current location (i.e. archane equipment not easily serviceable, the changing business).

So, Streit’s will likely cross the river into New Jersey later this summer where the company maintains a presence.

The tenements – together comprising some 50,000 square-feet – had been shopped around for the better part of the last decade. Asking price was usually in the neighborhood of $25 million.

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The packaging machine

Since 1925, the Streit’s Matzo factory has stood at 148-154 Rivington Street on New York’s Lower East Side. Here, in four, low-slung brick tenement buildings, five generations of the Streit family, and as many generations of factory workers, devoted their lives to the art of mixing flour and water, and sending these two simple ingredients through a seventy-three foot long oven to create sheets of matzo, the unleavened bread central to the Jewish holiday of Passover.

The last family-owned matzo factory in the United States, Streit’s has endured for nearly a century, continuing to produce 40 percent of the nation’s matzo using machinery as old as the business itself, and employing 60 workers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, native New Yorkers and immigrants from around the world, all of whom found a livelihood and a second family behind these walls.

[h/t Real Deal]