Forward Building

The Yiddish-language daily paper Forverts, meaning "forward," was founded in 1897 and moved into this ten-story building in 1912. There were many Yiddish papers in New York, but Forverts was the largest, with a circulation that reached 250,000 in the 1920s. The paper's socialist leanings are signified by the carved portraits of Karl Marx, his collaborator Friedrich Engels, and the German-Jewish socialist Ferdinand Lasalle just above the second floor of the building's facade. Note that there is also a fourth figure, whose identity is disputed. It is thought to be either Wilhem Liebknecht, an influential German socialist, and August Bebel, a German politician. The Forward Building was taken over by a Chinese church when the newspaper moved its offices uptown in 1974 and it has since been converted into condominiums.