The Rise and Fall of the American Robe Company

Based on the memories of Estelle Baker

In the 1930s, Bohemia was more than farms and woodlands. It was a place where a man who had lost everything in the city could come, find a building, and put two dozen of his neighbors to work. Estelle Baker’s memoir, Our Bathrobe Factory, preserves one of the most vivid first-person accounts we have of that side of Bohemia — the side that kept the lights on through the Great Depression and the Second World War.

The factory at the heart of her story stood on Ocean Avenue, just north of Church Street — the same large brick-and-frame industrial building that had been one of the major cigar factories in town during Bohemia’s “Cigar Capital of Long Island” era. By the early 1930s, that cigar operation had gone the way of most of Bohemia’s eight cigar factories — done in by the Great Depression and by machine-made cigars that hand rollers could no longer match on price. The big factory on Ocean Avenue went dark.

It would not stay dark for long.

From the City to the Hamlet

Irving Baker had immigrated to the United States around 1910 and learned the needle trades — the New York City garment industry’s name for cutting, sewing, and pattern work — in the shops of Massachusetts and New York. Like millions of others, he watched that livelihood evaporate when the economy collapsed; in his daughter’s words, he “lost his job in New York City during the big depression in the 20s and 30s.” For several years he looked for work without success.

His break came in 1934, when a New York City garment manufacturer named Schlisselberg decided to open a satellite operation in the empty Ocean Avenue factory in Bohemia. The arrangement was typical of the period: the owner stayed in the city; the on-the-ground production needed a skilled foreman who could run a shop, design the work, and supervise the line. Irving Baker took the job. The American Robe Company was born.

Life on the Line

Estelle’s memoir preserves a remarkably technical picture of how the factory actually operated, day-to-day — the kind of detail that almost never survives in the historical record of a small-town manufacturer.

Her father was the heart of the operation. He designed the patterns, sewed the samples himself, and “shipped them to New York City for approval.” Once a design got the green light, massive cases of fabric arrived by truck. Irving would lay out “piles of material on a forty-foot long table,” lay long paper patterns over the top, and cut the pieces with a “big, very sharp electric cutter.”

From there, the work moved to the line. The factory was set up as true assembly-line production. Irving would “bundle them for each lady, who would then sew one or two parts together and pass it on to the next lady.” Each woman owned one small piece of the robe; the robe itself was the work of twenty hands.

The roster of those hands — the women who actually built the American Robe Company’s output — is preserved at the end of this article. Many of their surnames will be familiar to anyone who knows Bohemia: Tmay, Adamec, Bartik, Kovanda, Kovarik, Swanda. These are the same families who founded the cigar shops, the fire department, the bakeries, the churches. The women of those families ran the sewing machines.

War Effort and a Full House

When the United States entered World War II, the American Robe Company’s machines did not stop — they retooled. Civilian bathrobes gave way to medical robes for U.S. Army hospitals, part of the vast civilian-industrial mobilization that turned thousands of small American factories into pieces of the war effort. A garment shop in a Long Island hamlet, sewing hospital gowns for wounded GIs, was exactly the kind of contribution the Office of Production Management was counting on.

The war also remade the Baker household on Church Street. When Estelle’s brother Sam joined the Marines in 1943, he left behind a small working farm — “200 chickens, 8 geese and a field of crops,” Estelle remembered. As her other brothers-in-law shipped out, their wives and children moved into the Baker home for the duration. “Full house!” Estelle wrote of those years. The chickens and the geese “came in handy” to feed the extended family through the rationing.

It is a small detail, but a telling one. The same family that ran the village’s garment factory was, at home, still running a small farm. Bohemia’s industrial age and its agricultural age had not yet fully separated — they shared a kitchen.

The Workers of the American Robe Company

The women whose hands actually built the robes, as preserved in Estelle’s memoir:

Ashes — and a Second Act

The Ocean Avenue factory’s story ended suddenly, and on a date no Bohemia child could ever forget: Halloween, October 31, 1952. As Estelle remembered it, the oil burner exploded and the building “burned to ashes.” Roughly two decades after the cigar operation that preceded it had quietly shut down, the great Ocean Avenue factory was gone for good — this time in a single afternoon.

But Irving Baker was not finished.

In the 1950s he acquired the old button factory on Karshick Street — a building tied to Bohemia’s other great immigrant industry, pearl-button manufacturing — and reopened for business under a new name: I. Baker and Son. The product line shifted with the times. Instead of bathrobes and hospital gowns, the new shop turned out ladies’ sportswear and blouses, riding the postwar boom in American consumer fashion.

I. Baker and Son operated through the early 1960s. By the late 1960s, the same forces that were hollowing out garment manufacturing in cities and towns all across the Northeast — cheaper labor abroad, containerized shipping, the long migration of textile work to the American South and then overseas — caught up with the small Karshick Street shop. The business was wound down.

The building, however, survives. Irving Baker’s grandson Kim converted the old factory into a residence, where it stands today — a quiet, repurposed monument to almost forty years of Bohemia industrial life: cigars, then buttons, then bathrobes, then sportswear, and now, simply, home.

A Memory Worth Keeping

The American Robe Company never appeared in any business directory we could find. It is mentioned in no national history of the garment industry. There are no surviving trade ads, no company catalogs, no Wikipedia entry. If Estelle Baker had not written Our Bathrobe Factory, this entire piece of Bohemia’s working history — twenty years, two factories, two dozen named workers, a contribution to the Allied war effort — would simply be gone.

It is exactly the kind of story that the Bohemia Historical Society exists to preserve.