Eat the City(60)

With Brooklyn luck, it turned out that Marco’s building had originally been constructed as a brewery. Marco didn’t know much about the history, but he thought it would be a poetic reversal to return the building to its former function. A couple weeks later, he showed Jon and Josh around. It was a cavernous space, with fourteen-foot vaulted ceilings, walls of naked brick, a cast-iron spiral staircase, and light flooding the place from long windows. Someone had scattered glitter across the floor, adding to a strange bright sense of enchantment in ruin. “This is amazing,” Jon said. “It’s nuts.”

This floor will be artists’ studios, Marco said. Then he led them upstairs. There were no lights in the stairwell, and a shock of wires burst from the wall. On the second floor, where more studios would be built, the ceilings were almost as tall. Even the attic had beautiful light, and the slanted wood rafters would make a charmed alcove where Marco would build an apartment for himself.

Finally Marco took them to the basement. Half of it, he said, could be theirs for brewing. The other half would be pub space. The whole floor was a fraction of the size of Jon’s 4,500-square-foot loft; half of it could work to start off—but they hoped to expand.

Jon got out a tape measure and pressed it against entryways, walls, elevator doors, and stairwells, noting the dimensions on a pad of paper. Where would a forklift deliver pallets of bottles? How would they move the kegs up the stairs? There wasn’t any clear way for the loading dock upstairs to access the cellar. If we wanted to do this, we’d need the whole floor, Jon thought. The old brewery used to take up the whole building, he thought. “You really need space, that’s part of the deal,” he said.

Later that week, at a beer pairing at a restaurant in Tribeca, Josh mentioned the possibility of moving into Marco’s old brewery. “No way!” said his friend Matt Levy, excited. Matt, an exuberant, mustachioed tour guide, had lived in Bushwick and become fascinated with the big, old, elegant brick industrial buildings that looked Photoshopped onto the aluminum-siding landscape he passed on his bike.

He had discovered his neighborhood had once been riddled with German-built breweries, along with the odd turreted brewer’s mansion. He happened upon Will Anderson’s out-of-print book The Breweries of Brooklyn and learned that at one point, brewers had filled Williamsburg—which had been two-thirds German—and Bushwick—then known as Dutchtown, from “Deutsch.” Meserole Street had been known as Brewers’ Row in the nineteenth century, when eleven German brewers operated corbelled breweries at once. They were former revolutionaries and innkeepers, brewers and farmers, who had washed up on Brooklyn’s shores looking to start businesses. In a city of short, often wood buildings, theirs stood out as grand institutions of heavy industry, with their tall chimneys and enormous icehouses and large properties for beer gardens. In his enthusiasm, Matt had created the Bike Brooklyn Beer Blitz, a six-mile bike tour of defunct breweries.

So when Josh mentioned the address of the place, Matt whipped out his iPad. He came up with a historical picture of the old Diogenes Brewing Company, built in 1898 in a last burst of German enthusiasm for lager, and closed after Prohibition. From the outside, it hadn’t changed that much: four stories tall, pretty brick arches over the windows, brick blocks on the sides. “Is this the building?” he asked. No doubt about it, that was Marco’s place.

Jon went back for another visit. ERECTED 1898, he noticed it said on the side of the building, and then he saw the interlocking monogram DBC, Diogenes Brewing Company. He had read enough about beer to know something about the structure of early breweries. The Diogenes Brewing Company would have used a gravity-fed system, milling the grain on the top floor and allowing it to pour down into the mash tun on the floor below, then to flow as a liquid down to the boil kettle below that. “I’m sure it was made that way—that’s why most of those buildings were tall and had multiple floors,” Jon said: architecture in service of a recipe. He and Marco wandered around looking for places where holes and chutes might have opened between floors. Jon discovered an old tunnel that once led from the basement to the end of the lot through a wall that had been cinderblocked over. Was it a Prohibition tunnel for secret deliveries? Had he uncovered an archaeology of vice? Or was it simply a way out to a loading dock?

Josh and Jon called the State Department of Health, the State Liquor Authority, and a small business startup help line run by the city to learn more about codes and regulations. Did their equipment need to be certified safe for food, as with restaurants? In the meantime, could they actually sell beer out of the garage in the current loft, since the place was zoned industrial? No one seemed to have clear answers.

At thirty-one and thirty-nine years old, respectively, Josh and Jon had been in New York for most of their adult lives, and had networks of friends and associates. They knew that Marco’s space could help them to make a brewery work in the city.

But Jon began imagining driving a truck through Brooklyn and Manhattan to drop off beer at bars and restaurants. He envisioned getting stuck in traffic, searching for parking, paying off massive tickets. “I would say I don’t want to get into a truck and do that,” he said.

They imagined struggling to move the mash tun and the boil kettle down the narrow steps into Marco’s basement, never mind the weekly deliveries of grain, and, eventually, carrying out the beer itself.

They worried about the neighborhood around Marco’s building. Parts of Bushwick may be filling with bars and restaurants, but this block struck Josh as industrial and pretty drab, kind of worn out, not a place where lots of people would frequent a pub anytime soon.