Eat the City(53)

Brewing was an incestuous world, as marriages bonded families of brewers, maltsters, and upstate hops growers. Franz Ruppert’s son Jacob worked in the brewing industry from age ten, and when he was old enough, he married the dark-haired, large-eyed Anna Gillig, the daughter of a brewer. Jacob’s sister Carolina married a hops grower in upstate New York, who became the country’s chief hops trader. His other sister Eliza married the brother-in-law of the brewer George Ehret.

And when Jacob wanted to strike out on his own, he followed the path that George Ehret had blazed. The handsome, audacious newcomer from Baden had ventured to the north of Manhattan Island, where he could drill seven hundred feet through solid schist for water pure enough to produce a convincing Munich lager. Jacob Ruppert bought an adjacent plot of land and became his neighbor. What is now the far Upper East Side was then a forest where officials had planted marble markers and iron rods amid the pine, tulip, and hickory trees to denote a grid that would someday be built into streets. Jacob chopped down trees with an ax, and in 1867, with his own hands, built a fifty-foot-square brewery, for a time the only permanent structure on that particular block other than a few scattered squatters’ shanties. That August, Jacob’s wife, Anna, gave birth to a son, also named Jacob, starting a dynastic line of brewers who would craft beer on that spot in upper Manhattan for the next eight decades.

Success was a question of timing. Jacob Ruppert and George Ehret were positioned at the right moment to slake the thirst of the arriving waves of German immigrants. The newcomers spoke Swabian and Upper-Rhenish, Berliner, Saxon and Westphalian, but all swilled down a stein of cool lager beer. The United States Brewers’ Association, which conducted all its meetings in German, had just been founded to lobby for the industry. As national beer consumption grew from about 36 million gallons in 1850 to about 855 million gallons in 1890, George Ehret became the top producer in the country, with Jacob Ruppert not far behind. Milwaukee and St. Louis combined produced a mere drop in the buckets of beer flowing in New York. In a sense, beer marked the city’s shift from an English place, with English-style ale, to a city of immigrants.

Yet lager had trouble winning its due esteem. Shady establishments sold women to their male customers along with the beer, and even respectable Lokals, German-style saloons, shocked outsiders by serving whole families. “The little boy, who is just tall enough to reach the table edge, has a mighty tankard of ‘lager,’ ” wrote a non-German, adding, “The Herr Papa views his youngest with satisfaction while the Frau Mama stuffs his mouth with pretzels and refreshes herself with a cool drink.” Lager sellers would advertise with signs depicting King Gambrinus, the patron saint of beer. “Sometimes he is presented life size, bearded and crowned, and holding in one hand a stupendous beaker of the national beverage, the froth of which bulges from the rim like a prize cauliflower,” wrote one observer. In a city with 7,071 establishments legally licensed to sell alcohol in 1870, the elite saw beer as nothing more than another way for the rabble to get drunk.

The Germans, however, thought it tasted like home. On hot summer nights, tens of thousands attended lantern-lit festivals fueled by beer, Schumann, and Schubert. Sunday evenings were spent at the great German American institution of the era, the beer hall. Fifteen hundred waltzers and schottischers filled gilded rooms decorated with gaudy frescoes depicting mythical Germanic scenes of “naked goddesses, grim knights, terrific monsters.” Some halls, such as the Concordia and Germania, such as, included bowling alleys, slot machines, and rifle ranges. Far from their homeland, Germans thrived on Gemütlichkeit, a sense of hominess and cheer—the enveloping camaraderie of beer.

So the Ehrets and the Rupperts prospered. They hobnobbed with congressmen over dinners of pigeons and steaks. They took off midweek for upstate fishing trips. They spent thousands of dollars on wild-eyed, fast-trotting stallions, which they harnessed to liveried carriages to commute a few blocks to work. They did not live among the city’s old-money elites. (“We Germans do not mingle with Americans in public,” some said.) Instead, they moved uptown near their breweries. George Ehret built himself a florid home on Ninety-Third Street and Park Avenue. Jacob Ruppert erected a turreted, gabled, mansard-roofed four-story mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-Third—“ coarse and ignorant,” said Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, but also nostalgic for old Germany. A dining room mural portrayed a procession of Rhineland children among sprays of vine and barley stalks, dancing, singing, and trundling a barrel of beer. In the basement was a Kneipstube, or drinking room, in German tavern–style, and over the Fifth Avenue window was a German inscription: MALZ UND HOPFEN/GIBT GUTE TROPFEN, or “Malt and hops/Make good drops.” Mounted on the wall was a spigot that had released some of the Jacob Ruppert Brewery’s very first beer.

At the beginning, the Ruppert mansion was surrounded by newly engineered streets slicing through flattened, empty fields. But throughout his childhood, Jacob Jr. watched the brewers’ fiefdom grow to fill the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side. Brewery managers and accountants bought genteel row houses and brownstones. Ruppert-owned tenements filled with coopers and maltsters, barrel washers and rackers, and droopy-mustachioed apprentices showing up with Old Country references. Soon came German meat markets, saloons, apothecaries, and music halls. When the winds were right, the smell of fresh beer drifted many blocks away toward the brewers’ grand houses of Fifth Avenue like a thick, low fog coming in from the east.