1927

Sunday Mornings at Cerny’s

If Schultz’s was the soundtrack of weekday errands, Cerny’s Bakery — sometimes spelled Czerny’s, depending on whose handwriting you trust — was the smell of Sunday morning. The line out the door was practically a Bohemia institution of its own. People remember standing in it as children, holding a parent’s hand, breathing in butter and yeast and sugar and trying not to fidget while the case slowly emptied of the good stuff.

What most kids didn’t know at the time was that they were tasting the work of a guild-trained master. Joseph Cerny, who opened the bakery with his wife Anna in 1927, had trained at the Rencove Guild School for Bakers in Prague before he ever crossed the Atlantic. By 1932 the family had built a proper brick facility at 1165 Smithtown Avenue, with the bakery on the ground floor and the family living above it — and at the heart of it all, a massive coal-fired brick hearth oven. That oven, with its thick masonry walls holding steady radiant heat, is the reason no one has ever quite been able to replicate the crust on a Cerny’s rye.

Everyone had a favorite. The Czech classics came out in force, especially around the holidays — beautifully braided Vánočka, the traditional Christmas bread, and Mazanec for Easter, marked with a cross. Year-round there was Houska with its raisins and almonds, Buchty in plump filled clusters (poppy seed was the clear champion in the comments, though prune and apricot have their loyalists too), and Koláčky with their open centers waiting for jam.

Then there were the salt sticks — and here the memories diverge into something close to folklore. Some swear they were a foot long. Others a little shorter. Everyone agrees they were impossible to leave the bag alone on the ride home. Add in the prune danish, the jelly crumb buns, twisted rolls so rich you didn’t need butter, and that rye with the crust kids would save for last after scooping out the soft middle — and you start to understand why people who moved away decades ago still talk about Cerny’s like they were there yesterday.

One detail that almost nobody outside Bohemia would believe: around the holidays, families whose turkeys or geese were too big for the home oven would walk their birds over to Cerny’s, where the bakers used the residual heat of that great brick hearth to roast the community’s holiday dinners. The bakery wasn’t just selling bread. It was lending out the warmest spot in town.

1903–1923

Cervenka’s, the Green Truck, and the Little Book

Long before Bohemia had a supermarket, it had Cervenka’s Market at the corner of Locust Avenue and Church Street — and it had a story behind it that almost sounds invented. In 1903 the village outgrew its little 1867 one-room schoolhouse and put the old building up for auction. Frank Cervenka bid exactly $100 and won it, with one catch: he had ten days to physically move the building off school property or lose it. He did it. He moved the entire wooden schoolhouse to the corner of Locust and Church and turned it into the town’s first Cervenka grocery.

His son Cyril took it from there. By 1923 the family had replaced the old schoolhouse with a proper brick building, designed by the master craftsmen Benedict and Swanda — the same firm responsible for the CSA Hall and the Chateau La Boheme. The new Cervenka’s had something almost nobody else in town did: a walk-in refrigerator. To a modern ear that sounds ordinary; in 1923 Bohemia, it changed what people ate. Suddenly fresh meat and produce could be stocked year-round, and the village’s diet stopped being so dependent on salt, smoke, and the season.

What people remember most, though, isn’t the refrigerator. It’s the green panel truck — Cyril Cervenka making deliveries personally, pulling up to the homes of the elderly and the cigar-factory workers whose shifts left no time to shop. And behind the counter, they remember the little book. During the Great Depression, when the cigar and button industries cratered and families couldn’t pay, Cyril kept a ledger and let people buy what they needed on credit, telling them to settle up when they could. For more than a few Bohemia families, that little book was the difference between dinner and no dinner. It’s the kind of thing you put on a plaque, except Cyril never would have asked for one.

The 1923 brick building is still standing at Locust and Church. It served as Cervenka’s, then the Family Deli, and today it operates as the Locust Avenue Deli — same corner, same bricks, more than a century of someone selling sandwiches and trading news on that spot.

1928–2022

The Castle in the Pines: Chateau La Boheme

And then there was the Chateau La Boheme — the strangest, most glamorous building Bohemia ever produced.

Completed in 1928, it looked like a French Provincial castle had wandered out of a Czech storybook and gotten lost in the Long Island pine barrens. Castle-like turrets, rugged stucco, half-timbering, an oriel window catching the afternoon light. It was the work of Winnie Benedict — the same master builder behind Cervenka’s brick storefront and the CSA Hall — commissioned by a mysterious figure the locals knew only as “The Baron.” His real name was Anton Boris Divis, and he claimed direct descent from a 16th-century Bohemian aristocrat executed in 1618 during the Thirty Years’ War. Whether the lineage was airtight or not, the Baron lived the part: gray suit, black bow tie, a wife with money, and a vision of a building that could hold his collection of Old World artifacts.

And what a collection. The dining room was anchored by a massive carved Italian fireplace reputed to be five centuries old, with a 350-year-old portrait of his alleged ancestor hanging above it. Two life-sized wooden knights guarded the room — Generals Liska and Veliky, leaders of the Bohemian forces during that same Thirty Years’ War. There was a 1500-era handgun carved with ivory, a 1739 mahogany sideboard seven feet tall from a Bohemian hunting lodge, a 1640 Austrian tapestry, scimitars and halberds on the walls, and a set of African waterbuck antlers from one of the Baron’s own hunting trips. People didn’t come to the Chateau just for dinner. They came to see it.

What they sometimes got, on top of all that, was a speakeasy. The Chateau’s remote location in the pine barrens made it a perfect Prohibition operation. Rum runners coming in from Montauk stored their goods in the building’s labyrinthine cellars, and the place became a glamorous, slightly illicit destination for the New York set looking to escape the dry laws. The silent-film legend Rudolph Valentino stayed there at least one night. The Prague-born Broadway composer Rudolf Friml — the man behind “Rose Marie” and “Indian Love Call” — was an occasional guest. Federal agents raided the place at least twice in the early 1930s, which only burnished the lore.

After Prohibition the Chateau settled into its second life as the Normandie Inn, still run by the Divis family until the mid-1960s. The dining room kept its medieval bones, and the menu kept its Czech soul — every basket of crusty rye and rolls came courtesy of Joseph Cerny down the road. Decades later, in its twilight years as a restaurant, the Normandie picked up one last famous regular: Ritchie Blackmore, the guitarist for Deep Purple and Rainbow, who became a familiar face in that Gothic dining room. By that point the building had also developed a reputation as one of the most haunted spots on Long Island — the ghost of a young woman named Maria, said to have been killed upstairs during the speakeasy days, made enough appearances to land the Normandie in Dennis William Hauck’s national directory of haunted places.

The end was hard to watch. The Normandie closed in 2004, and that same year someone stole the two life-sized wooden knights right out of the building. They were never recovered. The Chateau sat empty and weather-beaten for nearly two decades, and when a developer finally tried to renovate in 2022, the structure literally began to collapse on its own. It was demolished on May 16, 2022.

But Bohemia wasn’t quite ready to let the silhouette disappear. In 2024, a new building opened at 1500 Smithtown Avenue — a Jersey Mike’s, of all things, but built as a deliberate replica of the original Chateau, turrets and all. You can grab a sub in a castle. Only in Bohemia.