Abraham S. Levey Commercial Block

78-88 Middle Street

We start at the corner of Middle St. and Franklin Arterial at what is now Eventide Oyster Co.

Eventide Oyster is in the Abraham S. Levy Building, a two-story, flat-roofed, red brick building. In 2015, the Portland City Council designated it a Portland Landmark because of its position as a gateway to the historic India Street neighborhood. Built in 1922, it was designed for Levey by renowned local architect John Calvin Stevens and his son John. It still has its original patterned tin ceilings and large display windows.

From the start, the building benefitted from its prominent position in the city and contracts with some marquee long-term tenants. The most well-known was the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (better known as A&P), which occupied one storefront in the 1930s. This is not a Jewish story, but it is a Maine story: the A&P was founded by George Gilman, a non-Jewish businessman from Waterville. From 1915 through 1975, A&P was the largest grocery retailer in the United States (and, until 1965, the largest U.S. retailer of any kind). The A&P brand was as well known in its time as McDonald’s or Google is today.

Most of the tenants here in the 20th century were Jewish. They included the Reliable Furniture & Clothing store, which Abraham Levey initially co-owned with Sol Branz, and later moved to a larger space on Cumberland Avenue. Another tenant in the 1930s was fruit dealer David Blumenthal. Subsequently, and into the mid-1970s, his son Louis ran Blumenthal’s (kosher) Meat Market at the same address. Other tenants at different times were the New England Supply Co. Dry Goods, Benjamin Levinsky’s fruit store, H. Schultz and Sons furnishers, and the State Upholstering Co.

Abraham S. Levey was born in Riga, Latvia in 1885 and was buried at Mt. Sinai Cemetery in Portland in 1976 (Stop C01). He married Fannie B. Mack (1889-1974) in 1909. Abraham attended college in Latvia, but upon arriving in the U.S., he apprenticed as an interior decorator in Massachusetts, and then at age 19 opened an interior decorating shop that became Reliable Furniture. In addition to the Abraham Levey Commercial Block, he had extensive real estate holdings throughout the city. Both Abraham and Fannie Levey made a substantial contribution to Portland Jewish life, serving at different times as founding and/or board members of the Hebrew Day School on Newbury Street and later the Orthodox Hebrew School at Shaarey Tphiloh (Stop E04), the Levey Day School now at Temple Beth El (Stop W02), the Jewish Home for Aged (Stop E09); the Portland Jewish Federation, the Jewish Community Center (Stop D03) and the Abraham & Fanny Levey Chapel at the Jewish Funeral Home. In the Portland community more broadly, Abraham was a trustee of Maine Medical Center, the YMCA and YWCA, and he supported colleges in Maine and in Israel.