History
Cobblestone streets, two-way horse drawn traffic on the avenue, the ring of anvils as hot iron was hand forged into tempered steel: this was 70th Street and First Avenue, Manhattan, circa 1885, the year that John Krtil Funeral Home came into existence. The Krtil men of that era were immigrants from what would become Czechoslovakia. From a long line of barrel-chested blacksmiths, Jan Krtil saw a need for an undertaker to serve the needs of the growing Czech and Slovak community of the area. Having built a hearse and owning the necessary Clydesdales to pull said hearse, he plunked down $3 for an Undertakers License at the NYC Department of Health.
And the rest, as they say is history.
Since that day, and now for many generations, a John Krtil has always owned and managed John Krtil Funeral Home; Yorkville Funeral Service Inc., now one of the oldest funeral homes in New York State. Our credo, "Dignified, Affordable, and Independently Owned and Operated since 1885", has been fact since our inception. In my view, there are some fields of endeavor in which personalized, inherently fair, family to family service should be the prime directive. It is our adherence to these principles and our good reputation that gives us the ability to compete with both "name brand" or "budget" funeral firms. No matter the volume of work, we remain, in essence, that very professional yet personalized funeral home with a loyalty to our neighborhood and our clientele. To be in flux seems to be the norm in an ever changing Manhattan landscape. But we here at John Krtil Funeral Home Inc. have embraced a tried and true formula of service to families in need that will last another 136 years.
-John S. Krtil, Owner/Manager, John Krtil Funeral Home; Yorkville Funeral Service Inc.
Making Comparisons in a Grim Search
By: Robert Lipsyte
Making Comparisons in a Grim Search
By: Robert Lipsyte
featured in the New York Times on November 24, 1996 in Section 13 Page 1
featured in the New York Times on November 24, 1996 in Section 13 Page 1
IT was my job to arrange for the cremation. I was grateful for the task. Making calls, gathering information, is enough like what I ordinarily do to offer a kind of normalcy; for three days we had been sitting at a hospital bed in what we had finally come to accept was a deathwatch.
The first calls were to the brand-name funeral homes where I had gone, with increasing regularity over the years, to other people's memorial services, one on the East Side, one on the West Side. I did not know at the time that both had been recently bought by the world's largest owner of funeral homes, a Texas company with a large share of the high-end New York market. Because this is no investigative report -- at best a recounting of some comparison shopping in a time of emotional confusion -- no names will be used. Also, this is no shame-on-you fingerpointing; I point only at my own naivete. I hope someone will do a real job on this someday.
The people I spoke with at the two brand-name funeral homes, on the phone and in person, were subdued and professional. There was no false sympathy. I appreciated the directness. It also made it easier to question the prices.
A basic cremation would cost between $2,700 and $3,000. The funeral home would pick up the body from the hospital, then hold it under refrigeration, until a family member came to make a visual identification and go through an estimated one and a half hours of paper work. Then, accompanied by a ''licensed funeral director,'' the body would be transported out of state in a ''limousine'' to a crematory where bodies were cremated ''individually.'' This turned out to be a key word; the upper-end funeral homes implied that when several bodies are processed at the same time, you can never be sure exactly what is coming back.
The ''cremains'' would be available about four days later. An urn for the bones and ashes would cost anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars; a casket for a memorial service (which cost about $1,200) could go as high as $29,900. Solid copper.
There was something comforting, mesmerizing, in these calls; somehow they distanced me from the impending death, from dealing with grief. The numbers and the language were numbing. It was suggested at the high-end places that I create an ''expects'' file with them, but I said I would call back.
I called two places picked out of the Yellow Pages. At the first, a man with an Anglo name and an office in East Harlem spoke with the insinuating easiness of a car salesman. He said the total cost was $410. All his company did was cremations. Three business days to return the cremains; for an extra $125 I could have one-day service. He dismissed my question about group cremations, of getting other people's remains mixed in with mine. There were state laws about procedure, he said, which everyone followed.
''Then how can you explain,'' I asked, mentioning one of the top-end funeral homes, ''the disparity in price?''
''I get this question all the time,'' he said. ''You are going to have to ask them why they are so expensive. There is no rationalization.''
The other low-end place, in SoHo, was $399. They offered a room for a memorial service for $200.
The day after I gathered all this information I stumbled into a funeral home near the hospital, a somber but not unpleasant place. There were pamphlets on grief, free calendars and pens. An enormous, friendly young man who overflowed his desk handed me a sheet of paper with a price list, and went over it. Cremation was $995. I liked him immediately, but wondered if I was just cutting the difference between the high and low ends. We chatted. He said he was the fourth generation in the business that bore his great-grandfather's -- and his -- name. He said his immigrant great-grandfather had been a blacksmith in Eastern Europe who had probably made coffins, too. That became his trade in 19th-century New York. He said this was ''the only independent funeral home on the Upper East Side.''
He explained that cremation would be in a combustible cardboard box that left little residue. Remains would be returned in another cardboard box. He advised against buying an urn if there were any possibility we might want to scatter the ashes.
I asked him about the more expensive funeral homes. ''They are thieves,'' he said.
And the cheaper ones?
''Even in the very best of circumstances, there can be residue. If the circumstances are not of the best. . . .'' He shrugged.
No visual ID would be necessary, he said. If I filled in some of the blanks now, the paper work could be cut down to a few minutes when the next-of-kin came in to sign permission for cremation, a state law. He said to call when we needed him, and we did.
5 remnants of the old Czech neighborhood on the
Upper East Side
5 remnants of the old Czech neighborhood on the
Upper East Side
It’s been decades since Czech could routinely be heard on the streets. Restaurants like Praha and Vasata, heavy on the goose, duck, pork, and dumplings, are long defunct.
The Little Slovakia bar has vanished, and markets, bakeries, relief organizations, and travel agencies catering to Czech and Slovak immigrants closed their doors long ago.
Yet traces do exist of the former Czech neighborhood centered on East 72nd Street between First and Second Avenues. Created after waves of immigration in the late 19th century and then again in the 1940s, Little Czechoslovak once had a population of 40,000—with many finding work in local breweries (alongside their German neighbors in Yorkville) and cigar factories in the east 70s.
One of the oldest remnants stands on East 71st Street near First Avenue. This beige brick Renaissance-style structure opened in 1896, and its name is still carved into the facade: Cech Gymnastic Association. (Interesting side note: The architect is the same man who designed the building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on Washington Place.)
The Gymnastic Association, or Sokol Hall, was an elegant community center. “Old photographs show a space full of gymnastic equipment, ringed by a great oak gallery and painted like a European concert hall—marbleized columns and elaborate stencil and decorative work on the walls,” wrote Christopher Gray in the New York Times in 1989.
“The hall was a centerpiece for the Czech community in New York, offering dinners, theatrical events, concerts, bazaars and a comfortable social club.” Sokol Hall still operates as a gym, though the restaurant (see the sign above in a photo from 1940) seem to have vanished.
All of New York’s former ethnic neighborhoods had their own funeral parlors, and Little Czech is no exception. John Krtil got its start in 1885, and it’s the only one that remains, on First Avenue at East 70th Street...
Read the rest of the article:
The loss of soul in yorkville Op-ED
Featured in the Our Town Newspaper May 4, 2015
Realizing that while it is rather late in the game to attempt to forestall a rising tide, my life events of 2014 gave me pause to reflect on the price of development and its effect on what was once a working class neighborhood of four-story walkups. Being the owner of one of the oldest businesses in the area, the plight of Old Yorkville (roughly speaking, from 59th Street to 96th Street, and from the East River to Lexington Avenue) and the loss of our collective status quo has been personalized for me.
When surrounded by developers who seem to be seeking to build yet another millenial monolith at or adjacent to this very location, the profit-driven homogenization of Manhattan tends to get rather personal.
In an era when diversity is being championed as a by-product of 21st century progress, I remember the circa 1950’s and 1960’s neighborhood I came of age in as culturally heterogenous yet economically stable. Walking north on First Avenue from the 59th Street Bridge (as we called it), one could hear, from residents all, conversational Italian, Gaelic, Slovak, Czech, Russian, Yiddish, Hungarian, German, Greek, Spanish and yes even Chinese. You knew what part of the neighborhood you were in by the storefronts, where everything from mozzarella to moc/mak(ground poppy seeds, favored flavor of Eastern European bakers) were sold. In school, we were exposed to the wealth of African-American culture by the presence of students from East Harlem, just north of Yorkville. Likewise, Caribbean-born employees of the large hospitals throughout the East Side rounded out the vibrant, diverse dynamic of this area. The impact was not minute; my penchant for Afro-Cuban music and jazz started way back in the 1960’s, and remains an important part of my life to this day. Formative years indeed!
There were a great many disparate influences at work in Yorkville, but the common denominator was that we had an esprit de corps based on economics and locale...and that is what kept our neighborhood solid and strong. The streets were alive with vibrance and vitality, there was a watchful eye at every window, and anonymity was sometimes craved yet usually fleeting. But that was what gave this neighborhood its soul. It had issues, to be sure. What inner city area does not? But it always had a clearly discernible soul. That is, until it and its relatively inexpensive building prices became easy prey for real estate interests in the later 1970’s, with a seeming exponential increase in development with every successive year.
Which brings us to the critical mass of the here and now in 2015.
I do not mean for this column to be a lamentation for a past now relegated to the dustbin of history. I am not seeking to turn back the clock. I am aware that there is a dialectic of sorts underway here, and I don’t want to appear as if I am an opponent to the progressive thinking of 21st century New York. But when all that is recognizable in this neighborhood is a hospital complex or two, a number of churches and synagogues, a few schools and parks, and a handful of businesses, mine included, there is something rather unbalanced and inequitable in this development equation. Must the past be so disrespected that now even houses of worship, such as Our Lady of Peace, St. Stephen of Hungary, St. Elizabeth of Hungary (the only parish in New York serving the hearing impaired community!), not to mention the already late great Our Lady of Perpetual Help and Bethany Reformed, are on the auction block?
Such pressure to sell to perpetually feed a break-neck speed of development has resulted in the fracturing of quintessential old New York neighborhoods like Yorkville. This form of iconoclastic change is not being carried out in the name of the public good, vis a vis Robert Moses (who himself had some very grave issues regarding development and its impact on existing communities), but rather in the name of a seeming reverse Moloch, sacrificing the old in the name of the new, the new being where the profit margin borders on decadence and calling it all progress writ large.
However, I do not want to give any impression that I subscribe to the anarchist Proudhon’s assertion that property is theft. After all, I do not operate a not-for-profit corporation. But the degree of excess relentlessly pursued here smacks of a socio-economic Darwinism, a warped elitism in which buildings are more valued than existing and very real human communities, no matter the intent of the Landmarks Preservation Committee of Mayor Robert Wagner’s creation. For when real estate values throughout Manhattan have a unattainable mirage as a ceiling, no one but real estate interests benefit...and the loser, in every way, are the people, the neighborhoods, the communities that made old New York -- and old Yorkville -- a very unique and special place. For, it is written: What does it profit a man, to gain a fortune, and lose his own soul?
No less a sentiment can be applied to neighborhoods throughout New York, and specifically, to the community where I was born, where I was raised, where I have prospered, and where I intend to remain...Yorkville
John Krtil owns John Krtil Funeral Home on the Upper East Side
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