Max and Mollie Marker were immigrants without a formal education. During the 1920s, they purchased a house at Fourth and Penn Street next to the Ayer family mansion.

How did they do it?

Max and Mollie Marker immigrated separately to New York City during the 1890s, during a massive wave of immigration from Eastern Europe. Mollie Middelman arrived from Hungary in 1891 as a child around eight years old. Max Marker came from Russia in 1898 as a young man in his early twenties.

Max and Mollie found each other in the densely populated Lower East Side of Manhattan, and they married in 1902, when he was around 25 years old and she was around 19. Max had become a United States citizen and worked as a cigar maker. Living in a tenement among hundreds of other Eastern European Jews in Manhattan, by 1905 the Markers had two young children.

Move to Camden

We do not know why the Markers moved to Camden in 1907, but they found opportunities in business and real estate as they settled into an emerging Jewish community in East Camden. Living at 2307 Federal Street, Max worked in a cigar factory and Mollie opened a dry goods store. The two-story, wood-framed house and store would have been a dramatic change from the high-rise tenements of New York.

By 1910, the Markers began to buy and sell property in East Camden. At the time, building and loan associations made it possible for immigrants to obtain zero-interest mortgages, so this might have been a pathway to home ownership for the Markers. They bought a home and store at 2609 Westfield Avenue in 1910, then sold it in 1913, and next purchased another home and store farther east at 3511 Federal Street.

North Camden Opportunities

The 1920s opened new opportunities. Max registered a trademark with the Tobacco Merchants Association of the United States for the “Maxmor” cigar, which may signal a move from factory work to independent entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, the construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) was disrupting the more established residential blocks of North Camden, to the west of the Markers’ East Camden neighborhood. People were moving, houses were going up for sale, and the Markers seized the moment.

With construction of the bridge underway, in 1923 the Markers purchased an especially notable property at 400 Penn Street (the southeast corner of Fourth and Penn). Built in 1869, the stone-front, three-story house stood next to the large lawn of the Ayer family mansion at 406 Penn Street. Most recently, it been the home of a physician, Dr. John L. Nicholson. But like many others in the 1920s, Nicholson escaped the bridge construction by moving to Haddonfield and put his house up for sale.

For the Markers, the Penn Street house was a financial stretch, at $12,000 costing almost six times more than either of their properties in East Camden. But like others who bought in the bridge area at this time, they intended to convert the large residence into a multi-family apartment building. This would be home for their family, which had grown to three children, but also a continual source of income. They moved in and began to rent to tenants even as Max worked on renovations, including new wiring for the aging house.

Setbacks and Strategies

The Markers had been living in their Penn Street house for about nine months when disaster struck. On the evening of February 5, 1924, Mollie and the children were at the movies when an electrical fire began in their new house. Sparks began in the wiring of a second-floor partition, and then fire swept upward through the back part of the house. Discovering the fire, Max alerted tenants on the third floor and began trying to fight the fire, but he soon gave up and called the Fire Department. By the time firefighters arrived, flames were shooting from the second and third floors. They contained the blaze to the back of the house, but nevertheless water damage combined with the fire caused thousands of dollars of damage.

The Markers repaired and recovered, and within months were back to advertising their first floor as space for a doctor’s office as well as seeking upstairs tenants. Meanwhile, real estate values in the area of the bridge were soaring as speculators bought and sold property. The Markers took their chances on the market by listing the 400 Penn Street house in an auction of numerous properties at the end of 1925. The auctioneer beckoned buyers to bid on “over 125 parcels which are bound to double in value this Spring and [with] completion of the Bridge.”

For the Markers, the auction in 1925 apparently did not attract a buyer or a satisfactory price. (In fact, North Camden real estate prices reached their peak in 1925 and then fell.) The Markers retained possession of the home. By 1930, they had a full house that included a fourth child, tenants ranging from industrial workers to a stockbroker, and a doctor’s office rented out on the first floor.

The Markers also bought another store, this time in their new neighborhood.  A block from their home, much of Third Street between Penn and Pearl Streets served as a commercial row of small houses with stores run by immigrants on the first floor. The Markers joined this business community in 1926 by purchasing a building at 333 N. Third Street (Third and Linden). Here, while Mollie ran the apartment business, Max operated a cigar store, likely making his own cigars. Eventually they rented out the store to other operators. 

Sources

Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com).
Camden Newspapers (Newspapers.com).
Dorwart, Jeffry M. Camden County, New Jersey: The Making of a Metropolitan Community, 1626-2000. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Sanborn Insurance Maps, Princeton University Libraries.
U.S. and New Jersey Census (Ancestry.com)

Cite: Charlene Mires, "Meet the Neighbors: Max and Mollie Marker," Learning From Cooper Street, https://onlineexhibits.camden.rutgers.edu/s/cooper-street/page/markerfamily.