Once settled here, the Democratic Socialist Cahan, became active in New York’s socialist movement, worked in cigar factories by day, while studying English by night. His language studies were so successful that he himself taught English, and began writing for a variety of workers' papers eventually founding the independent socialist Forward in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily socialist newspaper. In this photo, Abraham Cahan, Forward founding Editor in chief, journalist and published novelist, reviews copy for print in the Forward newspaper he founded. By the close of his career Cahan would have created over six decades worth of writing, published in both English and Yiddish.

This photo, depicts the first edition of the paper, published on April 22, 1897. Now over 120 years old, The Forward also began publishing an English-language weekly newspaper in 1990. In 2019 it transitioned to its present digital format.

In his early days, Ab Cahan recalled reporting from the nearby Mulberry Street police station when he was called upon to use a telephone for the first time in his life. Lucky for him, also working out of the same station at the time was muckraking photojournalist Jacob Riis who showed him how. Riis, himself a Danish immigrant most famous for “How the Other Half Lives,” a seminal work of photojournalism, like Cahan, chronicled the lives of newly-arrived, tenement-dwelling New Yorkers around the turn of the 20th century. With immigration at the turn of the last century, inhabitants of the Lower East Side had a mere 100 square feet of space per person.

Aside from a few years working for the Commercial Advertiser, during which time he interviewed Buffalo Bill Cody among others, Cahan spent the rest of his life as the increasingly renown Editor in chief of the Forward. During his time away -- encouraged by Lincoln Steffens to write about New York in English -- Cahan wrote his novel, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, which was adapted into the film, “Hester Street,” in the 1970s. The film, which was helmed by a woman and filmed on location in the Lower East Side, featured Carol Kane and Doris Roberts speaking Yiddish dialogue.

Having founded one of the earliest newspaper advice columns, the "Bintl Brief," Cahan had plenty of material to draw from for his fiction. In its early days, the Forward made its home at a number of Lower East Side addresses including in a loft on 14 Duane St. a few blocks from both city hall and newspaper row, with its business office at 32 Suffolk St.

Later, in 1906, the paper would move to 35 Chrystie St. before eventually settling in for over half a century at its East Broadway address.

Location! Location! Location! In 1912, Cahan initiated construction of the George A. Boehm-designed Forward building. Ten stories high, with terra cotta ornaments in a beaux-arts style, it enabled the paper to house more printing presses as well as an auditorium on its second floor for performances, gatherings, funerals and even community health care events such as vaccinations. The Forward or Forverts as it is known in Yiddish, was then just one of numerous Yiddish language papers produced in the neighborhood on East Broadway’s Yiddish newspaper row. An event at the Forward building could draw as many as 15,000 to 20,000 attendees. Cahan himself envisioned a people’s temple, and it truly was the hub of cultural, political and Jewish life on the Lower East Side. A popular event was watching election night returns, along with cartoons, projected outside the building.

The Jarmulowsky Bank's 12-story, classical-styled building on Canal Street lorded over the neighborhood blaring its capitalist message. Cahan is said to have been inspired to build the Forward a 10-story, elevator office structure as an alternative, community-centered, model of self-determination.

For years, two 30,000-watt neon rooftop signs with the paper’s name in glowing Yiddish and English could be seen all around the Lower East Side. Facing Manhattan to the southwest, you’d see the English sign, while facing the neighborhood, you’d see the Yiddish one. The exterior remains famously adorned with reliefs of historic socialist leaders: Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Friedrich Adler, and Friedrich Engels. The Forward building was home to a diverse array of progressive labor and cultural organizations such as the labor union United Hebrew Trades and the headquarters for the Workmen’s Circle. The second-floor auditorium was even home to the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. For many years, the Forward Building was known as the “address of the Jewish people.”

In their time, newly arrived Yiddish-speaking immigrants went there to pick up their mail, reunite with family members and townsfolk who were looking for them, seek advice financial and otherwise and generally speaking, unburden themselves. Although the paper has moved from its historical foundational home, it remains vital to the American Jewish conversation today. More than a million unique visitors turn to Forward.com each month for award-winning news, thoughtful commentary, and captivating videos. Today the building has achieved landmarked status, is privately owned and has been developed into condos, all the while retaining those same socialist relief images initiated by Cahan back in 1912. In 1974, with lower circulation figures,  the Forward sold the structure. It was home to a church before it was eventually sold to a condominium developer.

The Forward remains fiercely independent and aligned with Ab Cahan's vision as a media organization that works to create a better-informed, more deeply-engaged American Jewish Community. A mere cheese blintz or two (or five) away from the Forward building was a beloved dairy restaurant the Garden Cafeteria. An affordable, popular corner hangout with the Yiddish journalists who held court there, the joint was said to be divided according to the range of political beliefs. Famous vegetarian and Nobel prize-winning Forward writer Isaac Bashevis Singer ate there frequently. Currently, the site is home to neighborhood favorite Wu's Won Ton King

Ab Cahan continued to manage the Forward fulltime until his 1946 retirement. At the end of his life, he lived in Manhattan’s famed Algonquin Hotel. Shortly thereafter, he died at the age of 91 in 1951 at Beth Israel hospital and is buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, New York. At the end of his publishing and writerly life, after organizing and witnessing, of writing on revolutions, and two world wars, deadly industrial malfeasance and its human toll, strikes and the dream of the democratization of the American work force, this line from Ab Cahan's 1917 novel "The Rise of David Levinsky" resonates: "Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be.” Rest in #newyorkstrong power Ab Cahan . כבֿוד זיין אָנדענק koved zayn ondenk.