The Dealer of Charles Street

by ERICA LOME Associate Curator

Jewish immigrant Philip Rosenberg brought vigor to the American antiques trade in the early twentieth century

isitors to Charles Street in Boston in the 1920s could find themselves at the center of America’s love affair with the past. Shop after shop offered antiques, silver, and other decorative arts from the colonial period. In one of its earliest issues, The Magazine ANTIQUES featured Charles Street in its directory of Boston antiques shops, informing readers that “Hundreds of New England families that have not yet parted with all their historic furniture let occasional pieces go, and collectors continually reduce surplus or dispose of items of minor value in favor of rarer examples. The dealer seems an invaluable go-between in many of these transactions.” The majority of these “invaluable” Charles Street antiques dealers were Jewish immigrants from Europe, including Philip Rosenberg (1878-1951), proprietor of The New England Antique Shop. During the early twentieth century, Rosenberg made a name for himself in the antiques business as a buyer and dealer of, among other things, period furniture, hooked rugs, English ceramics, and Pennsylvania redware. His business earned a reputation for quality and excellence, as did Rosenberg himself. Historic New England recently acquired a gift of photographs, furniture design drawings, trade catalogues, and ephemera from The New England Antique Shop. This collection provides a glimpse into the broader contributions of Jewish immigrants to the American antiques trade.

A Russian-born, native Yiddish speaker, Rosenberg immigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century. He was previously a peddler in Europe, as were many other Jewish immigrants who entered the antiques trade. Most had apprenticed as cabinetmakers before coming to America. Cabinetmaking, like tailoring or shoemaking, required a degree of skill to learn and execute, yet had flexible working hours and was ideal for the religiously observant. Cabinetmaking also offered a pathway to entrepreneurship, so that a trainee starting in a shop could reasonably accumulate enough capital to rent or buy their own shop and staff it with kinspeople. By the late nineteenth century, antisemitism in Europe had intensified and antiJewish riots (known as pogroms) swept the Russian Empire. These factors, among others, no doubt prompted Rosenberg and his family to go to America.

In Boston, Rosenberg encountered an industry in formation. The 1904 Boston Directory showed only three self-declared “antique” shops, but by 1918, the numbers had jumped to twenty-eight, and by 1924, forty-seven. The growing antiques market created demand for specialists who could evaluate, restore, and reproduce period furniture. Most American-born cabinetmakers lacked the training to execute certain types of work by hand, such as carving, inlay, and joinery; instead, they learned to operate furniture-making machinery. Skilled immigrant craftsmen filled those gaps in the trade, and many leveraged their experience to become prominent antiques dealers. Rosenberg probably drew on long-established Jewish occupational networks to secure his first job in America. By 1922, Rosenberg was working in the back of the shop of fellow Jewish immigrant Louis Palken (18831940), owner of The New England Antique Shop. Working in Palken’s shop introduced Rosenberg to collectors, who brought their finds to the craftsmen for repair. They would become Rosenberg’s first antiques buyers in 1926 when he and his business partner, Max Webber, took over the business.

The transition from handson cabinetmaker to dealer was increasingly common among Jewish entrepreneurs like Rosenberg. First-hand experience with woodworking allowed Rosenberg to oversee repairs, discern forgeries, and evaluate furniture based on construction techniques. His neighbors on Charles Street, including Israel Sack, a Lithuanianborn cabinetmaker-turned-dealer, marketed themselves as well positioned to help buyers navigate the complex world of collecting and connoisseurship. As the new coowner of the business, Rosenberg continued to offer the same goods and services many had come to expect from the Charles Street shop: antiques and reproductions to order. Rosenberg traveled throughout New England to search for the former, knocking on doors and asking to look inside attics and barns for dusty, old furniture that could be transformed, with the help of a good cabinetmaker, into prized antiques.

Rosenberg’s stock was relatively modest in comparison to that of Israel Sack or Philip Flayderman, whose 1929 auction drew recordbreaking prices. They each acquired large groups of antiques from New England collectors at high prices, thereby inflating the market. This business practice worsened already trenchant nativism and antisemitism among their Yankee clients.

Antiquarians like Walter Dyer, author of The Lure of the Antique (1910), believed the “birth and breeding” of the immigrant dealer made it impossible for the purveyor “to appreciate a single thing he owns, except as it represents cash.” However, these opinions did not stop collectors from working with Jewish dealers. While Rosenberg’s personal feelings on the matter went unrecorded, the American antiques trade gave many Jewish dealers both financial security and a sense of belonging to their adopted homeland. Some even became experts on American decorative arts and freely shared their knowledge with the public.

Rosenberg’s business flourished after he exhibited highlights from his shop in New York City at the first International Antiques Exposition in 1930, where one reviewer commented, “To use a phrase of salesmanship, the American public is ‘sold’ on antiques.” Americans were also sold on reproductions. A high-quality copy was a perfectly acceptable option for affluent consumers looking for a wedding or retirement gift, or to fill a gap in an antique furniture suite. Less affluent consumers sought reproductions to emulate the interior design of early American households; these consumers may not have had family heirlooms, but they could purchase an “heirloom of tomorrow.”

Rosenberg outsourced this work to the Irving Furniture Company, a mid-size firm in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Order forms show that Irving supplied colonial-style furniture to Rosenberg to sell in his shop, such as a pie-crust table, satinwood chairs, and magazine racks. Rosenberg was also involved in the production process, evidenced by several furniture design drawings in the collection.

One of these designs for a Chippendale-style chair (labeled “Set B”) includes a full-size rendering of the chair back. The designer paid deliberate attention to the details of the pierced splat and scrolled ears, no doubt inspired by genuine eighteenth-century examples—or perhaps by the antiques in Rosenberg’s shop. Yet, the chair itself has no direct eighteenth-century precedent. Early twentieth-century designers often combined elements of Chippendale or Hepplewhite furniture that educated consumers would recognize in their products. This was not a deceptive practice, but a pragmatic, cost-effective choice for both parties. The volume of orders Rosenberg placed (at least a dozen for each form and style) indicates a healthy market for highquality reproductions. Rosenberg could rely on this secondary trade to supplement his business while he collected old New England furniture.

In addition to antique furniture, Rosenberg specialized in hooked rugs, a nineteenth-century form originally made by lower-income households using recycled textiles. Interest in hooked rugs was revived by needlework practitioners and antiques collectors in the 1920s, who enjoyed them for their whimsical, colorful designs. One of Rosenberg’s biggest customers was Henry Davis Sleeper, who bought many hooked rugs for himself and his interior design clients. Sleeper acquired more than fifty hooked rugs over his lifetime to decorate Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House, his summer home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which Historic New England now owns.

The 1930s represented the peak years of The New England Antique Shop. A dispute between Rosenberg and Webber in 1945 ended their partnership; while Rosenberg continued to operate the business alone, he closed its doors in 1949; two years later, he died at the age of seventy-seven. The contents of the shop were put into storage for nearly seventy years before they were sold at auction.

Philip Rosenberg and the Jewish antiques dealers of Charles Street were more than just an immigrant success story; these new Americans profoundly shaped the antiques market, guiding how early American furniture and decorative arts were to be valued and understood. Now part of museum collections across the nation, including Historic New England’s collection, the treasures they collected and restored continue to inform how we think about American heritage.