THE Pickle War on the Lower East Side is getting ugly.

When Guss Pickles, a Lower East Side institution for more than 90 years, closed in December after a bitter dispute with its Essex Street landlord, it looked as though there would be no pickles at all in a neighborhood that is as known for the briny gherkins as Chinatown is for dumplings or Little Italy for cannoli.

But last week, stomachs throughout the neighborhood stopped grumbling at the news that Alan Kaufman, a former Guss employee, had opened a new pickle store just a few doors up from the shuttered Guss site.

Meanwhile, Tim Baker, the owner of Guss Pickles who was Kaufman’s mentor and friend, announced that he was reopening – setting the stage for the first pickle war in decades.

This tale of betrayal, madness, jealousy and rage makes “King Lear” sound like a child’s bedtime story.

Consider the history: Baker hires Kaufman in 1981 and teaches him everything he knows about pickles – learned from history’s greatest pickle men.

But then Baker abandons the store to avoid, as he called it, “killing my landlord,” leaving Kaufman to run the shop.

By the time Baker got evicted, Kaufman was ready to fly solo.

“I can’t believe what Alan is doing to me,” Baker said as he made last-minute renovations to his new store at 87 Orchard St. “We were friends, and now he stabs me in the back.”

Kaufman tried to take the high road.

“I have no war with him,” said Kaufman, whose store, The Pickle Guys, still has that new-pickle smell. “But he knows I ran his operation for the last seven years.”

Behind the tale of betrayal is a bitter battle for the legacy of Lower East Side picklemaking. Where once there were 100 picklemakers, now there are only two.

And the accusations are flying. Former Guss employees even claim that Baker isn’t even making his own pickles, instead buying them from a Bronx factory – a charge that Baker deflected with his own attack.

“Alan doesn’t even know how to make a sour pickle!” said Baker, who claimed that his secret recipe for sour pickles is kept in a safety-deposit box in a Jacksonville, Fla., bank. “I never taught Alan that. Sure, he’s made three-quarter sours, but he can’t make a full sour.”

Kaufman seemed saddened by Baker’s attacks. “He can say what he wants,” Kaufman said. “But he knows I know pickles.”

>>3396933

Even as the beloved, traditional Jewish food establishments of the Lower East Side seem to be locked into an irrecoverable downward spiral — the death of Gertel’s bakery being the most recent example — a war has been raging over who is the legitimate heir to the Guss’s pickle empire that once ruled over Essex Street.

It is a war that evokes the fractious pushcart vendors on Hester Street — where Izzy Guss, a Russian émigré, founded his pickle business in the 1910s — but is now conducted against a backdrop of the modern-day, gentrified, luxury-condo-dominated neighborhood.

Izzy Guss just might be turning over in his grave.

Let’s recap some of the basics of this war, as Cara Buckley recounted last November.

Mr. Guss died in 1975. His store, which opened in 1920 on Hester Street and eventually moved to Essex Street, was sold to Harold Baker, whose son, Tim, a pickle apprentice and now master, eventually took over the business.

Guss’s Pickles had a longstanding relationship with the Leibowitz family — the patriarch Max, a son David, a grandson Stephen and now a great-grandson Andrew — who supplied the pickles and now co-own United Pickle Products in the Bronx. It is reputedly the largest family-owned pickle wholesaler on the East Coast.

In 2002, Andrew N. Leibowitz opened a Guss’s Pickles shop in Cedarhurst, N.Y. His father, Stephen A. Leibowitz, who calls himself chief pickle maven of United Pickle and supplies his son’s shop, says the family bought the rights to Guss’s Pickles from Mr. Baker. The family trademarked the name Guss’s Pickles that year.

Mr. Baker continued to run a Lower East Side store until 2004, when he decided to get out of the business to care for his ailing mother. Stephen Leibowitz says his family turned down an offer from Mr. Baker to buy the store.

In came Patricia Fairhurst, who bought the lease to the store — now on Orchard Street — and continued to use the name Guss’s Pickles. (Both she and the Leibowitz family actually use the name Guss’ Pickles, preserving the original punctuation and omitting the final S.)

Ms. Fairhurst and the Leibowitz family got along at first; she used the Guss name and bought the family’s pickles. That suddenly changed, according to the Leibowitzes, in 2006, when Ms. Fairhurst decided to buy her pickles from another supplier. The Leibowitzes asserted that she would have to stop using the Guss name. They set up a Guss’s Pickles Web site that asserts that theirs are the only true Guss’s Pickles.

Ms. Fairhurst retaliated by filing a federal lawsuit [pdf] in which she denied she was infringing on any trademark. She accused the Leibowitzes of unfair competition and “tortious interference.” The Leibowitz family, in answering the lawsuit [pdf], denied the accusations. The Leibowitzes also filed a counterclaim [pdf] asserting that they have the exclusive right to the Guss’s Pickles trademark.

Ms. Fairhurst has recently gone on a public relations offensive. In a New York Post article today, she criticized Whole Foods Market — including its newest branch, on Bowery in the Lower East Side — for carrying the Leibowitzes’ pickles. “They never came from me,” Ms. Fairhurst told The Post. “I am Guss’s Pickles.”

Not so, says Stephen Leibowitz. “She did not buy Guss’s Pickles,” he said in a phone interview. “She bought a pickle stand.”

For now, Whole Foods is standing by the Leibowitzes. “We’ve always carried these pickles, for many, many years,” said Fred Shank, a spokesman for the supermarket chain. “We believe we are selling the original Guss’s Pickles.”

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, meanwhile, seems to be siding with Ms. Fairhurst. It has a Web page that is devoted to the fabled eateries of the neighborhood and that characterizes Ms. Fairhurst as the heir to the Guss tradition.

(Daniel Arnheim, a spokesman for the museum, says the Web site “was part of an ongoing series of articles meant to support and promote good will among local merchants.” He said in an e-mail message: “We’re not taking sides and don’t wish to be presented as taking sides in this dispute. … It was not intended as endorsing one purveyor vs. another.”)

Meanwhile — as if this could possibly get more complicated — a third pickle business, The Pickle Guys, was started in 2003 by Alan Kaufman and other former employees of Guss’s Pickles. They were dismayed that the original business had left Essex Street, its home for so many years. Mr. Kaufman’s Web site boasts, “Today we are the only pickle store that exists on Essex Street.”

All three businesses — Andrew Leibowitz’s Guss’s Pickles of Cedarhurst, N.Y.; Patricia Fairhurst’s Guss’s Pickles of Orchard Street; and Alan Kaufman’s Pickle Guys of Essex Street — say they sell rabbinically supervised kosher pickles. All are closed on Saturdays in observance of the Jewish Sabbath. All claim that their recipes are faithful to the traditions of Izzy Guss.

slanging corpses again

follow the trail of death eulogy

E.T. cemetary to the ore graveyard of muertiarty

>>3397050

that's your reverse alice in wonderland

>>3397065

uranium miners from the 1940s and 1950s have had abnormally high rates of lung cancer, from radon gas in poorly ventilated underground mines. The effect was particularly pronounced among Navajo miners, because the incidence of lung cancer is normally low among Navajos. The Navajo tribe, whose reservation contains much of the known ore deposits, declared a moratorium on uranium mining in 2005.

The USPHS study raised ethical concerns. The Navajo workers were rarely notified of the possible dangers which the USPHS was studying.[6] As late as 1960, the USPHS medical consent form failed to inform miners about the possible health risks of working in the mine.[7] The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, created in 1994 to explore the treatment of the workers, said: "'Had they been better informed, they could have sought help in publicizing the fact that working conditions in the mines were extremely hazardous, which might have resulted in some mines being ventilated earlier than they were."[7] The USPHS failed to abide by a centerpiece of Nuremberg Code (1947), by failing to have informed consent of the subjects of a research study.

White workers also faced different conditions: Navajo workers were forced to enter the mine directly after a detonation, while it was filled with dust and smoke. However, the white workers were able to stay behind.[41] Navajo miners were paid less than miners from off-reservation, well below minimum wage.[42][43] Until radon exposure safety standards were imposed by the Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz over the objections of the Atomic Energy Commission and the uranium mining industry in June, 1967,[44][45] mines lacked ventilation, exposing workers to radon.

Widows of mine workers met to discuss their grief; they started a grassroots movement that eventually reached the Congressional floor.[6]

The Church Rock uranium mill spill raised claims that race was a factor in the federal government's paying little attention to the disaster:

When there was a relatively minor problem at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the entire attention of the Nation was focused on this location and the Federal and State assistance brought to bear to deal with it was extraordinary. When the largest release of radioactive material in the history of the United States occurs in Navajo country, however, the attention paid to it by the Federal and State authorities is minimal at best.[46]

— Peter MacDonald, Chairman of the Navajo Nation

In September 1983, the Alamogordo Daily News of Alamogordo, New Mexico, reported in a series of articles that between ten and twenty[63] semi-trailer truckloads of Atari boxes, cartridges, and systems from an Atari storehouse in El Paso, Texas, were crushed and buried at the landfill within the city. It was Atari's first dealings with the landfill, which was chosen because no scavenging was allowed and its garbage was crushed and buried nightly. Atari officials and others gave differing reports of what was buried,[64][65][66] but it has been speculated that most unsold copies of E.T. are buried in this landfill, crushed and encased in cement.[67] The story of the buried cartridges was erroneously regarded by some as an urban legend, with skeptics—including Warshaw—disregarding the official accounts.[12][46][49]

On May 28, 2013, the Alamogordo City Commission approved Fuel Industries, an Ottawa-based entertainment company, for six months of landfill access both to create a documentary about the legend and to excavate the burial site.[68] On April 26, 2014, remnants of E.T. and other Atari games were discovered in the early hours of the excavation.[6][69]

A fictional account of the game's disposal is the main basis for James Rolfe's 2014 independent film Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie.[70] A documentary called Atari: Game Over in which several of the buried games were unearthed was released in 2014.[71]

In December 2014, The Smithsonian Institution added an excavated cartridge of E.T. to their collection.[72] In 2015, The Henry Ford museum added several excavated cartridges and a video touchpad, a sample of landfill dirt taken from the site of the burial, and items of clothing worn by the excavation team to their collection. A selection of these items are on permanent display

from a et grave through a valley ofdeath they made to thier crpyt the navajaos dug

>>3397249

Every year, as we plan for Maker Faire Detroit behind the scenes, The Henry Ford’s curators think about what items from their collections might be brought out for special display during the event. At this year’s Faire, a new acquisition will make its public debut—items retrieved from the infamous “Atari Tomb of 1983” in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

As any good folklorist will tell you, urban legends usually prove to be fabrications of truth that have gone awry and gained their own momentum, spread by word of mouth and media publicity. But sometimes—urban legends turn out to be true. In April 2014, excavations at the Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill unearthed every video game fan’s dream: physical evidence that the legend of the “Atari Video Game Burial” of 1983 was indeed a very real event.

>>3397318

By 1982, Atari’s once-stellar sales were floundering, and the company became a key player in the “Video Game Crash of 1983” (known as the “Atari Shock” in Japan). The reasons for crash were complicated—largely, the market was flooded with competition, and personal computers were gaining traction as gaming machines.

Many people view the difficulties surrounding the video game adaptation of the blockbuster Steven Spielberg film, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, as the final nail in the company’s coffin. Atari believed the game would be successful, manufacturing approximately 5 million cartridges—but only selling 1.5 million. At a time when most games took about a year to develop, Howard Scott Warshaw was given a mere five weeks to create a game version of the E.T film. Atari rushed the game in order to meet production schedules for the Christmas sales season, believing the success of the film would drive sales of a video game. Many were bought—and many were returned by disappointed customers. The chief complaint being that it was “unplayable”—in fact, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is widely considered to be the worst video game of all time.

>>3397331

In 1983, Atari’s arcade division was sold to Warner Communications, and shifted its focus to the home computing market. And stories began to circulate: fleets of unmarked trucks from El Paso were dumping unsold Atari merchandise into a landfill in New Mexico. Atari 2600 game console units and game cartridges were rumored to be among the items being dumped, crushed by construction equipment and entombed under a layer of concrete to deter theft. In order to confirm the truth of these events—in a time before Internet searching capabilities—one would have had to either witness the trucks, hear stories from the locals, or read the articles being printed in the Alamogordo Daily News about the burial. Initially, Atari denied these allegations, but later confirmed that approximately 700,000 cartridges were in fact disposed of.

>>3397331

>>3397346

Interest in the “Atari Tomb” lingered over the years, circulating within popular culture. In 2014, after navigating a forest of red-tape, a team consisting of the Tularosa Basin Historical Society, Microsoft, and a documentary film crew were granted a permit to dig on the site, accompanied by professional archeologists. Since the burial occurred during a time period when disposal was not tracked, and the landfill is hundreds of acres in size, the crew had to rely on eyewitness testimony, vintage photographs, and photogrammetry to locate the burial point. On the second day of digging, the tomb was located. The team working below giddily held up the first cartridges to emerge: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Centipede, and Asteroids were among them. The City of Alamogordo released some of the recovered material for sale via a public eBay auction, and donated a portion to museums—not only giving people the chance to own a piece of one of the most infamous stories connected to the history of video games—but literally, some of the “dirt” that goes along with it.

>>3397367