A Long Island Institution Is Cooling Its Ovens.

The white box with the blue script and cellophane window was an indelible part of growing up on Long Island.

When Bill Hayduk was a teenager, his mother, a nurse who worked the night shift, would stop on her way home at a supermarket or a 7-Eleven and pick up a box of Entenmann’s for breakfast — “a doughnut, a turnover or a cinnamon bun,” recalled Mr. Hayduk, now 50 and the owner of a bagel shop, his eyes lighting up at the memory. The treats did not just sit atop kitchen counters; they were served at first communions, bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals.

Call it Long Island’s Proustian treat.

Yet by July, Entenmann’s, now sold in 48 states, will shutter its Long Island bakery, a five-acre white behemoth, and lay off 178 of the plant’s 265 workers. The cakes, pies and cookies will still be sold in the New York area, but they will be baked at other plants, either in other Entenmann’s bakeries or in the plants of other brands that its parent company, Bimbo Bakeries USA, owns. The marketing, research and distribution offices will remain in Bay Shore, as will the popular discount outlet that sells cakes approaching their sell-by date ($1 for a box of frosted chocolate doughnuts). But the bakery, operating in Bay Shore since 1905, will be gone.

William Entenmann, an immigrant from Stuttgart, Germany, first established the bakery in Brooklyn in 1898, delivering cakes in a horse-drawn wagon. When his son began suffering from rheumatic fever, he moved the store to the healing air of Bay Shore, according to a company website. Morgans and Vanderbilts enjoyed a slice now and then, and Frank Sinatra, in the 1950s, placed weekly orders for crumb coffeecake.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/nyregion/a-long-island-institution-is-cooling-its-ovens.html?_r=0