In the 1880s, the arrivals of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants brought the bagel to New York City, where vendors threaded the hole-shaped bread onto dowels and hawked them on street corner.
Bagels slowly gained popularity but continued to be rare in United States. According to food historian John Mariani, the first mention of bagel in United States was in 1932.
The US bagel industry took off in New York City between 1910 and 1915 with unionization of bagel bakers. The popularity of bagels spread beyond urban centers when Polish baker Harry Lender opened the first bagel plant outside of New York City in 1928 in New Haven, Connecticut.
Until, the late 1950s, bagels were handcrafted in small two or three person cellar bakeries in New York’s Lower East Side.
By the 1990s, Americans were consuming a large quantity of bagels, spending more money on them which was estimated $900 million than on doughnut ($500 million).
As bagel chains proliferated throughout the United States, bagels lost their Jewish identity, becoming instead a New York food.
Bagels in United States
