Eat the City(56)

And he continued to sell beer. Like other brewers, the Rupperts would purchase corner storefronts, install mahogany booths and brass railings, paint murals on the plaster walls, hang mirrors and nudes, and mortgage the places to the barkeeps, bringing them into their debt. Beer came with a free lunch—Bismarck herring with onions, vinegar, and Tabasco, sandwiches of fresh-cut bologna full of garlic and cloves, highly seasoned wursts, and limburger, mustard, and horseradish. Of course, Ruppert-owned saloons sold, exclusively, Ruppert-made beer.

Something had happened to lager beer in America. Bavarians had relied on their heavy, nourishing beer as food—they called it liquid bread—but New Yorkers disliked the dense flavor and found the heavy hoppiness sour and bitter. They wanted something lighter and less filling. The brewers answered with light-bodied, low-alcohol, translucent, foamy Bohemian lager. In underregulated America, the Rupperts, like other brewers, broke with European tradition, stretching the mash with corn to create a cheaper, lighter brew. The Rupperts named their beer Knickerbocker, after the mythical Dutch New Yorker. No doubt about it, theirs was a New World beer.

With his political connections in place and a growing customer base, Jacob Jr. helped organize the Rupperts into efficient vertical production, investing in an ice factory (for cooling), horse stables (for transportation), forestry concerns (for making wooden barrels), real estate (for saloons), banks (for credit), and the German-language paper the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (for favorable press). The Rupperts’ double-team horses clip-clopped up and down the cobblestone streets of the city, and sales soared for Knickerbocker, Ruppert’s Extra Pale, and Ruppiner.

The Industrial Revolution had helped create a city of extremes. Tenement blocks for the new class of workers sprouted up the whole East Side and through the middle of the West Side, each tall, narrow, slapped-together building packing people so densely that strangers shared their secrets, their odors, their heat, and their illnesses. Meanwhile, among the new tycoons, lavish parties included “black pearls in oysters, cigars rolled in hundred-dollar bills, lackeys in knee breeches and powdered wigs,” as publishing houses churned out etiquette books to guide social climbers. The city’s high society was opening to people like Jacob Ruppert Jr., a nouveau-riche industrialist who had led such an insular life in America that he had a German accent.

Slumming was in vogue, and men in evening dress would wander the impoverished East Side late at night with police escorts. You could stop at chop suey houses or hole-in-the-wall saloons such as Chick Tricker’s Flea Bag, the Billy Goat, and the Cripples’ Home. Opium, morphine, and cocaine were available in drugstores. Jacob Jr. was a member of the prestigious Larchmont Yacht Club at a time when fellow members held a stag dinner at Sherry’s restaurant in Manhattan, where guests chased a young stripper called Little Egypt and party favors took the form of drug-ready syringes.

Jacob Jr.’s sisters received lavish weddings under canopies of lilies of the valley and roses, consolidating the family’s status and promising brewery heirs. Anna wore a diamond-studded veil and received her father’s gift of a fully furnished house. Amanda wore orange blossoms woven into her dress and her hair. But Cornelia, a beauty with dark, soft eyes and pale skin, had been expected to marry George Ehret’s son Frank, finally merging the next-door brewing dynasties. Instead, she eloped with Nahan Franko, the renowned Metropolitan Opera concertmaster. As well as failing to be a brewer, he was divorced, Jewish, a musician—entirely inappropriate for a Ruppert heiress—and the newlyweds were barred from the Ruppert home thereafter. When Cornelia died suddenly less than two years after her marriage, the sensationalist Hearst-owned New York Journal had a field day. “True Romance of Cornelia Franko,” the newspaper headlined. Her father had removed her body to a private mausoleum without her husband’s consent, and Hearst filled in all the salacious details: “Chap I.—How the Lover Robbed the Brewer of His Daughter. Chap. II.—How the Brewer Tried to Rob the Violinist of His Wife. Chap. III.—How Death Robbed Them Both. Chap. IV.—How the Brewer Robbed the Bridegroom of His Dead Bride.” None of this had been part of the business plan, but in an era like today’s when scandal meant publicity, the Ruppert enterprise soldiered on.

The ascendant Jacob Jr. cultivated the aristocratic habits of his class. He paid thousands of dollars for blooded Saint Bernards—Marvel, Remnant, and Lady Bountiful III, broad of chest and rough of coat—and the dogs’ births and deaths and matings made the sports pages. In 1902, when the term “automobile” had only recently been coined and laws were just being enacted to regulate their use, Jacob Jr. was arrested for “running an automobile beyond the lawful speed limit.” He sipped glutinous turtle soup with the men who moved New York and he danced with society women in brilliant gowns of grenadine and brocade silk. Finally, after two generations, Ruppert beer wealth had bought acceptance into the highest reaches of New York society. A former mayor jokingly gave the up-and-coming Jacob Jr. a pet ocelot called Tammany—Tammany Hall had been caricatured as a corpulent tiger devouring the body of the republic. Jacob Jr. was an insider.

But a new period was just around the corner. The big German brewers of the Midwest, who lacked the luxury of a giant local market, were already seeking to expand their distribution to New York taprooms. Pabst, Miller, and Schlitz in Milwaukee and Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis reached out nationally as soon as technology allowed them to bottle their beer and send it in refrigerated railroad cars. They created networks of depots and warehouses, salesmen and agents; the portion of all U.S. beer brewed in New York City decreased from 22 percent in 1880 to 16 percent in 1900. Local brewers like Jacob Sr. tried to stop rivals from offering rebates and loans to their saloonkeepers, but their grip was loosening. Wrote the American Mercury: “Adolphus Busch would drop into town, take over a floor at the Holland House, and make the local brewers look drab before departing with his pockets crammed with orders for Budweiser.”