Ehrlich's (David P. Ehrlich Company)

Ehrlich's, formally the David P. Ehrlich Company, is a tobacconist and pipe maker that operated in downtown Boston for more than a century. The business traces its roots to a cigar and tobacco shop Ferdinand Abraham opened in 1868 in the South End, on Washington Street; Abraham moved downtown in 1880, and the firm never left that neighborhood again. David P. Ehrlich joined the shop in 1881 at age twenty, later married his employer's daughter, and devoted the rest of his life to the business. The company took his name in 1916; management later passed to second-generation relatives, including Richard A. and William Ehrlich.

Addresses in the Heart of the City

The firm's addresses line up along Boston's historic core. The 25 Court Street location it entered in 1880 sat near where, in the 1720s, James Franklin, with the help of his brother Benjamin, had printed The New-England Courant. In 1908 it moved to number 37 on the same street; after the Second World War the shop relocated from its then-location at 33 Court Street to 207 Washington Street, across from the Old State House. When that building was demolished in 1967, its final stop was 32 Tremont Street, adjacent to the city's oldest cemetery, King's Chapel Burying Ground. The mahogany display cases built for Court Street at the turn of the century were dismantled and reinstalled at each new shop, so the interior look was largely preserved across generations.

The centennial year of 1968 was marked by two separate events: the January issue of Antiques magazine carried an article by Wendell D. Garrett introducing the firm's collection of tobacco and pipe artifacts, and the Boston Public Library's Copley Square building devoted a twenty-five-case exhibition to the same collection that same month.

A Bench Behind the Window

Ehrlich's dealt in production as much as in sales. Raw material consisted of briar sourced from Algeria and meerschaum brought from Anatolia. The carvers' bench was positioned to face the shop window, turning pipe making into work that could be watched from the street; during the 33 Court Street years, the bearded master Gustave Fischer was the window's familiar face. Even after briar bowls moved to an electric lathe, meerschaum continued to be worked on an Austrian-made foot-powered wooden lathe. The firm is thus counted among the late links of American meerschaum carving, represented in New York by workshops such as F.J. Kaldenberg.

The use of amber as the mouthpiece material on premium pipes drew the firm into amber trading as a side business; since old pieces were also collected, it came in time to be known for a broad range of amber jewelry as well. The Boston Museum of Science holds a display case, donated by the firm, telling the story of amber.

Stamps and Grades

The EHRLICH name struck on bowls is usually accompanied by a grade name. At the top of the grades was Connoisseur, introduced around 1965-66 and seen only rarely; on this line, the number stamped on the bowl, such as 25, indicated the pipe's price tier at the time. Below it, in descending order, came Deluxe, Supreme, State, and Select; Special Grain and Boston sit at the bottom of the lineup. Early mouthpieces bear the PARA stamp, indicating the grade of vulcanite used; from the mid-1970s onward, standard vulcanite was used instead.

Leavitt & Peirce and the Last Masters

Both Ehrlich brothers were Harvard graduates; Richard A. was in the class of 1922 and William in the class of 1925. When Harvard Square's storied tobacconist Leavitt & Peirce went up for sale in 1956, they took over the shop and left its interior, including the metal ceiling, untouched. Founded in 1883 by Fred H. Leavitt and Wallace W. Peirce, that shop remains open in Cambridge today. The firm's last pipe maker, George Bushee, in the 1970s and into the early 1980s, found bowls that had been turned between 1903 and 1913 and forgotten in storage, and finished them with mouthpieces and ferrules matching the taste of his own day; since the bowls were not his own work, he did not stamp them with his "GB" initials. Bushee retired in 1986, continuing for a while afterward to make handmade briar pipes for the firm from home. According to his son Richard Bushee, who represented the firm at a 1980 Dunhill dealer meeting in London, retail operations continued into the 2000s.