The headquarters of Jswipe, a Jewish alternative to Tinder, are located in an old, dilapidated warehouse at the very end of North 12th Street in Williamsburg. “When you think you’re lost, you’ve made it,” David Yarus, the 28-year-old founder, tells me. “We’re in this crazy factory, 16-wheelers and all.”
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Like the app, which in some ways harkens back to the idea of the shadchan or Jewish matchmaker of yesteryear, the building feels like a bridge between the old world and the new. Inside the high-ceilinged loft that functions as both the offices for the tech startup and Yarus’ apartment, a half-dozen or so trendy-looking twentysomethings are typing frantically on their laptops as Lil Wayne blasts from a pair of speakers. Down the hall is the Queens Typewriter Stationary Corp., which has been repairing typewriters and adding machines throughout the five boroughs since 1922, around the same time the Jewish population in New York City first began to boom.