Eat the City(94)

66 Thrift Flight from San Juan to Idlewild cost only $52.50: Great descriptions of the journey are found in Dan Wakefield, Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 29.

67 by the 1950s, 43,000 people: César Ayala, “The Decline of the Plantation Economy and the Puerto Rican Migration of the 1950s,” Latino Studies Journal 7, no. 1 (Winter 1996), 63.

68 Sugar production on the island peaked: Suarez, “The Rise and Decline of Puerto Rico’s Sugar Economy,” in Sugar and Sweetener, S&O/SSS-224/December 1998. Economic Research Service/USDA, 24.

69 the sugar industry laid off 42,000 Puerto Rican workers: Ayala, “The Decline of the Plantation Economy,” Latino Studies Journal 7, no. 1 (Winter 1996), 80.

70 When the Fanjuls announced three years later: Winifred Curran, “Gentrification and the Nature of Work: Exploring the Links in Williamsburg, Brooklyn,” Environment and Planning A 36 (2004): 1254.

71 “relics from a bygone era”: Ibid.

72 “Out of huge barrels loom red sugar cane”: John Walker Harrington, “Food That Tempts Harlem’s Palate,” New York Times, July 15, 1928.

73 like sugarcane in February: Sayings contributed by Jorge Torres in New York, Hector Luis Freire in Cidra, Puerto Rico. Others from Cristino Gallo, Language of the Puerto Rican Street: A Slang Dictionary, (Book Service of Puerto Rico, 1980).

74 “I can see from here/the cane fields”: Cesar J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom (Chapel Hill, NC: Unversity of North Carolina Press, 1999), 249.





5. BEER


The collections and files of K. Jacob Ruppert were incredibly helpful in writing this chapter, as were extensive newspaper and magazine accounts. Older books on the history of brewing include Stanley Baron’s Brewed in America and Herman Schlüter’s The Brewing Industry and the Brewery Workers’ Movement in America. Dorothee Schneider’s Trade Unions and Community vividly describes brewery structures and working conditions. Maureen Ogle’s Ambitious Brew gave a more contemporary history of beer in America. For the history of Manhattan’s early German neighborhood, I turned to Little Germany, by Stanley Nadel.

1 Beer-loving Germans: Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,), 41.; For the number of breweries, see Bill Harris and Jorg Brockmann, One Thousand New York Buildings (Black Dog and Leventhal, 2002), 320. Also Fred Ferretti, “Where Have All the Breweries Gone?” New York Times, August 9, 1978.

2 “[They] brew as good beer here”: Stanley Baron, Brewed in America: A History of Beer and Ale in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).

3 a quarter of all: Hermann Schlüter, The Brewing Industry and the Brewery Workers’ Movement in America (Cincinnati: Press of S. Rosenthal & Co., 1910), 31; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxofrd University Press, 1999), 33.

4 Later laws also limited times for brewing: Dorothee Schneider, Trade Unions and Community: The German Working Class in New York City, 1870–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

5 where he could drill seven hundred feet: George Ehret, Twenty-Five Years of Brewing with an Illustrated History of American Beer (self-published, 1891), 48, 84.

6 Milwaukee and St. Louis combined: Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006), 55.

7 “The little boy, who is just tall enough”: Georg Techla, Drei Jahre in New York, 100–101. Quoted in Stanley Nadel, Little Germany (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 105.

8 “Sometimes he is presented life size”: Charles Dawson Shanley, “Signs and Show-Cases of New York,” Atlantic, May 1870.

9 “naked goddesses, grim knights, terrific monsters”: George C. Foster, New York by Gas-Light (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, reprint of 1856), 157.

10 “We Germans do not mingle with Americans”: Burrows and Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 989

11 A dining room mural portrayed: “Decoration & Furniture; New Houses—Indoors and Out,” The Art Amateur: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Art in the Household, March 1883, 4, 8.

12 MALZ UND HOPFEN/GIBT GUTE TROPFEN: “Two Highly Interesting Rooms; A ‘Kneipstube’ in the House of Jacob Ruppert and the Pompeiian Parlor of Nathan Strauss,” New York Herald Tribune, December 6, 1903.

13 “Wealth … is rushing in upon us like a freshet”: Lopate, Writing New York (New York: The Library of America), 191.

14 “We brewery workers have already”: New Yorker Volkszeitung, February 18, 1881. Quoted in Dorothee Schneider, Trade Unions and Community: The German Working Class in New York City, 1870–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 136.

15 When finally the workers tried to form unions: Herman Schlüter, The Brewing Industry and the Brewery Workers’ Movement in America (Cincinnati: Press of S. Rosenthal & Co., 1910), 156.

16 “Show this apprentice no favors”: “Beer and Baseball,” The New Yorker, September 24, 1932.

17 “polluted harpies that, under the pretense”: Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981), 13.

18 his father kept the brewery lawyer Congressman Ashbel Fitch happy: Letters of Ashbel Fitch, 1890. Courtesy of K. Jacob Ruppert.