Historian Kathy Jolowicz remembers like it was yesterday when she couldn’t walk down 86th Street without hearing people speak German.

 She remembers when she could get authentic German food at mom-and-pop shops and when Christmas time meant the streets were ambushed with music, the polka and the waltz. She remembers when the Upper East Side was Yorkville, where everything from the old country was either imported or recreated to feel like home.

“It’s my passion, its my heritage, it’s my childhood,” Jolowicz said, who was born and raised in Yorkville. “It was my Disney Land.”

Jolowicz lived the memories that are now in picture frames on her walls and are written in massive books on her shelves.  But she shares those memories in exhibits and lectures and displays over 40 pictorial panels that are 30 by 40 inches wide, decorated with Yorkville facts and photos.

During her lectures, her topics shift according to what her audience wants to know.

“If it’s a young group, they all want to know about the war, what was it like for Germans in the war,” she said. “If I have an older group, they reminisce.”

Jolowicz has been writing a book that covers German roots in New York City from the 1600s to the 1960s. It also covers the German’s contributions to New York City and the Upper East Side when it was German Town, or Yorkville/Kleindeutschland.

When she started the book in 1988, she originally wanted to write a six-chapter book about Yorkville. However, the book has grown to 20 chapters as she continues to research and add information about Germans in the city.

“It’s not that you just sit down and write a book,” she said.  “There are so many details that have never been put together and that’s what I’m trying to do now. It’s not easy.”

She also writes about her family. Her parents Ruth and Paul Jolowicz were Yorkville pioneers and moved to New York City in 1932 from Leipzig.

“When you write from the head, the chapters about my family and my experiences, and how they adapted to this country and how I grew up in the adaptation of their life, that was easy,” she said.

Another topic she touched on was her family’s experience adapting to America during World War I and II. At the time of the World Wars, Jolowicz said Jewish kids picked on her for being German American when she was younger.

“Germans still have a bad connotation, not so much the younger ones, but the Holocaust is kept alive, and rightly so,” Jolowicz said. “I would have never condoned such a thing. What I’m trying to do with my book is to bring out the positive side to Germans.”

Jolowicz started the German Language Learning Club in 1990 where she teaches children and adults German at P.S. 169 between Park and Lexington Avenues. Her students and their families march in the German American Steuben Parade every year. Jolowicz, who has two Bachelors of Fine Arts degrees, is currently working on her German Language Certificate from the Goethe-Institut in Germany.

She holds a Stammtisch that meets once a month in Yorkville to eat, drink beer and speak German whether native or non-native. Since 1973 she has run the East 83rd/84th Street Block Association. And she’s a member of Friends of the Upper East Side Historic District.

“My memories are still in my heart of walking 86 Street, the music, everybody knowing everybody,” she said. “This was a community, it was a family, it was a village. And it was all I knew.”

Holzer recently sat down with Our Town to talk about putting together the exhibit, and how Lincoln’s image was forged in New York.

Historian Harold Holzer thinks Lincoln’s relationship with New York has been underappreciated. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Q: Why has Lincoln’s relationship with New York been underappreciated until now?

A: I think because other states have always been in frenzied competition to claim that they made Abraham Lincoln who he was. If you go to Kentucky, you know that every building, every pathway, is marked as the place where Lincoln first opened his eyes and developed a love for the land. And, of course, Illinois geographically references his early career, the Senate races, his political development. Against that competition, it has been hard to make the case. But it is our contention, and I think we make a very good case for it.

Q: What kind of artifacts and documents are represented in the exhibit?

A: I’m so proud of what has been assembled from collections all over the country. It includes the lectern that Lincoln used at Cooper Union in his famous speech. The first painting made of Abraham Lincoln, which was made in his office in Springfield in June of 1860. He had never sat for an artist before, and it was commissioned by a New York publisher, and it really tells the story of how New York created the Lincoln image. There’s the uniform that was worn by the first Union officer to be killed during the Civil War. He was a New Yorker. He was a student in Lincoln’s law office, and one of his bodyguards. After the Civil War began, this officer marched across the river to haul down a Confederate flag from a hotel in Virginia that he could see from the White House. And the owner of the hotel shot him with a shotgun. And there is the uniform in the collection with a huge hole in the breast. It’s pretty startling.

Q: Was the Lincoln image largely made in New York?

A: Absolutely. This is where the artists and the publishers were. This is where the distribution networks were. Because just like today, New York was the media center of the nation. The biggest newspapers, the biggest picture newspapers, the biggest publishers, portraits, engravings, posters, tokens, all of those things, were manufactured here. That’s not to say that the image-makers here loved Lincoln. They simply saw him as a profit opportunity.

Q: What was Lincoln’s relationship with New Yorkers?

A: He won over the Eastern Republicans but he never won over New York. He only won 30-something percent of the vote here in 1860. He didn’t do much better in 1864. It was a big Democratic town. But all he had to do was to convince influentials like Horace Greeley and the young Republican moderates in New York that he was a viable alternative to William Seward, that he would be acceptable as a candidate. They wanted a Westerner, but they didn’t want a Western buffoon. And they had heard that Lincoln was, in fact, a sort of a buffoonish character.

Q: The New York poet Walt Whitman wrote a famous tribute to Lincoln for the 22nd anniversary of his death. Is this poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” included in the exhibition?

A: Yes, it’s written in huge letters to remind people of the grieving during that Easter period after Lincoln’s murder. So we emphasize it very much. And, of course, Whitman is important not just because he crystallized national emotions over Lincoln’s passing, but because he saw Lincoln so often in Washington. He actually saw him in New York when Lincoln came here as president-elect. Whitman was in a trolley or an omnibus, a double-decker, a horse-drawn of course, and he was pulled over near City Hall to wait until Abraham Lincoln arrived at that hotel. Whitman was very concerned that the crowd was too quiet. He found it very threatening, and he thought it portended a very serious and challenging time for Lincoln and for the country. Of course, he was right.

Q: What do you want people to take away from the exhibition?

A: I would like for them to take away a new sense of how crucial New York City is in the evolving reputation of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. We never had a battle here, but we certainly had conflict and debate. We had violence on the streets. We had vicious newspaper attacks, and we had a boisterous community of support and compassion, and efforts to help the soldiers and to support the war financially. This was a very important state in the history of America and the American Civil War. And had Lincoln never come here to give his Cooper Union address, I am convinced that he would never have become president. When people walk into the show, the first thing they will hear is my friend Sam Waterston reading highlights of the address from Cooper Union.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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“Lincoln and New York”
Through March 25
New-York Historical Society,
170 Central Park West
212-873-3400