Eat the City(59)
Where can you buy alcohol in Manhattan? asked the New York Telegram in 1929, far into Prohibition. The answer was extensive: “In open saloons, restaurants, nightclubs, bars behind a peephole, dancing academies, drugstores, delicatessens, cigar stores, confectionaries, soda fountains, behind partitions of shoeshine parlors, back rooms of barber shops, from hotel bellhops, from hotel headwaiters, from hotel day clerks, night clerks, in express offices, motorcycle delivery agencies, paint stores, malt shops, cider stubes, fruit stands, vegetable markets, taxi drivers, groceries, smoke shops, athletic clubs, grillrooms, taverns, chophouses, importing firms, tearooms, moving-van companies, spaghetti houses, boarding houses, Republican clubs, Democratic clubs, laundries, social clubs, newspapermen’s associations.” Beer and wine, whiskey and gin, were clearly still around. But something did vanish: the corner saloons, the beer halls where people lingered all evening among friends—the casual working-class culture of beer.
Instead, mobsters organized to produce hard liquor, which brought in many times more money. Cocktails came into vogue as bartenders and experimenters grew expert at using fruit juice, syrups, and sugar to mask the taste of bad booze. A whole generation came of age swilling down a Manhattan after a Sidecar after an Old-fashioned.
Still, some mobsters became bootleg beer specialists. The blue-eyed, beak-nosed Owney Madden ran the Phoenix Brewery on Tenth Avenue and Twenty-Fifth Street in Manhattan, where he kept more than forty fermenting and storage vats with 25,000-gallon capacities, some connected to the sewers for easy draining in case of a raid. As an outlet for his “Madden’s No. 1” beer, Owney also bought the Cotton Club in Harlem—where black dancers entertained white customers amid antebellum décor including bales of cotton and a plantation shack. Meanwhile, the sloppy, brutal Dutch Schultz, in his cheap, baggy suits, sent beer delivery caravans “thundering up the cobbled pavement on the West Side free from interference,” to make predawn deliveries to beer drops like “The Tins,” rows of metal garages near Mott Haven in the Bronx. One brewery on Pulaski Street in Brooklyn developed an elaborate system to pipe its beer underground to the garage of a moving company a full block away.
Gangsters waged beer wars with spectacular violence. Men would force their rivals to take sledgehammers and axes to destroy their own fleets of delivery trucks. They would stalk drivers and payroll men at night and kill them at home in their bedrooms. Mobster brewers built offices behind double sets of doors: a regular-looking door to the street, and another, internal steel-armored door, with a peephole covered in bulletproof glass.
Upstate, near Cooperstown, New York, in an area that had produced 90 percent of the country’s hops, farmers pulled up their plants to make room for new crops. Like many of the longtime German brewers in the city, Jacob Jr. soon diversified into non-intoxicating products such as ice, a kind of fermented milk, and classic malt syrup. The syrup was used to make ice cream and candy—and home brew, or heimgemacht, the most popular beverage in Yorkville. Grandmothers made it, children sipped it, and speakeasies trafficked it.
Jacob Jr.’s chief chemist dutifully bought beer de-alcoholizers and struggled to find the most efficient technologies to strip alcohol to create near beer, a virgin barley drink that no one ever really liked. It is not entirely clear whether the Rupperts, like other brewers, also quietly bottled and sold full-alcohol brew. The Colonel kept all his workers on the payroll—Out of charity? To keep them quiet? To keep them up late at night when no one would notice them brewing full-alcohol beer?
Jacob Jr. had also expanded into another, more popular industry. Just after the war began, the Colonel had been solicited to purchase the scrappy, losing New York Yankees. He went into the 1915 purchase “in a sporting spirit,” he later wrote, “like buying a lake, or a shooting preserve.” By the early 1900s, baseball had become a national institution that was supposed to represent the best of American values—country born, class neutral, good, clean fun. The game was thought to have the power to make immigrant children American. In a sense, that’s what it did for Jacob Jr. as an adult.
After buying the team with a partner, he briskly acquired new management and purchased Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox. In 1917, days after Congress authorized American entry into World War I, the Yankees had their opening game of the season. The Colonel had his team members pass for review before Army men, shouldering their bats like guns. When the Yankees were evicted from a shared, rented ballpark, Jacob Jr. purchased ten acres of brush-filled land across the Harlem River and built his own $2.5 million Yankee Stadium with 67,000 seats. It was the largest ballpark in the country, the first enclosed structure called a stadium in U.S. sports—and the first place where the owners could control sales of hot dogs, peanuts, and, yes, eventually, beer. The Colonel showed up at games with glamorous guests like Amelia Earhart and the king and queen of Siam. Unless the Yankees piled up at least a ten-run lead, one journalist wrote sympathetically, “He shivers, turns up the collar of his coat, and leaves the park with an, ‘Ach, I can’t stand it.’ ”
So the imperious, Teutonic-accented Colonel became the back-slapping Jake. Despite his beer and his German roots, the Colonel emerged during wartime as the popular patron of America’s favorite pastime.
MARCO Boggio Sella, an artist friend, was sitting in Jon Conner’s kitchen drinking a beer. He had just purchased a decrepit industrial building in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn and was about to launch into renovations, intending to develop artist studio spaces. As he was telling Jon about the project, he had a thought: Could his space be made into a brewery? “Hey, this could be an option,” he told Jon. “It’s an awesome offer,” Jon said.