Eat the City(96)

58 ordered members across the country: “Chicago Ready for Zero Hour,” New York Times, April 6, 1933.

59 “Beer may not be intoxicating”: “Friday Morning Beer,” Washington Post, April 6, 1933.

60 “an uptown brewery”: “Broadway Disappointed,” New York Times, April 7, 1933.

61 the form of six Clydesdales: “Six Big Horses Bring Smith a Case of Beer,” New York Times, April 8, 1933.

62 George Ehret had never recovered: “Ruppert Acquires Ehret Brewery,” New York Times, April 6, 1935.

63 “Take it from an old-timer”: Display Ad 14, New York Times, July 18, 1933.

64 “The dainty glass bottle of Ruppert’s”: Display Ad 11, New York Times, October 12, 1935.

65 only twenty-three breweries left in the city: Fred Ferretti, “Where Have All the Breweries Gone?” New York Times, August 9, 1978.

66 Across the country, the great brewing families: Ibid.

67 Hijackers kidnapped: “Beer Truck Seized in Hijacker’s Raid,” New York Times, May 3, 1933.

68 A Ruppert employee exchanged shots: “Brewery Payroll Saved in Hold-Up,” New York Times, September 6, 1934.

69 A Brooklyn barkeep was terrorized: “Beer Thugs Wreck Brooklyn Resort,” New York Times, September 13, 1933.

70 “Colonel Jacob Ruppert says men marry only”: “Bachelor Apartment,” Bachelor magazine.

71 he ordered all home games thereafter: Jay Maeder, “Jacob Ruppert: The Old Ball Game,” New York Daily News, March 2, 1999.

72 The Colonel said one word: “Ruppert Dies at 71,” New York Times, January 14, 1939.





6. FISH


John Waldman’s amazing book Heartbeats in the Muck was an accessible and impressive overview of New York City’s harbor. Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel provides such a ravishing account of the Fulton Fish Market and other watery locales that decades later, it’s hard to find any more to say. The book Manahatta by Eric W. Sanderson, and his article with Marianne Brown, “Manahatta: An Ecological First Look at the Manhattan Landscape Prior to Henry Hudson,” helped me to imagine the waterways of Manhattan of yore. Various articles in scientific journals helped elucidate the problem of local contaminants that fishers consume with the fish. Seaport Magazine, Winter/Spring 1990, an issue dedicated to New York Harbor, was helpful, as was Clyde L. MacKenzie, Jr.’s The Fisheries of Raritan Bay, which tells everything you ever wanted to know about fishing on the bay that abuts Staten Island, including offering an oral history of the last fishermen there. The Report of the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission of New York in 1910 gave vivid detail about early contamination.

1 a poll of two hundred women: Laura Anne Bienenfeld, Anne L. Golden, and Elizabeth J. Garland, “Consumption of Fish from Polluted Waters by WIC Participants in East Harlem,” Journal of Urban Health 80, no. 2 (June 2003).

2 “This was the first time the U.S. EPA”: Jason Corburn, “Combining Community-Based Research and Local Knowledge to Confront Asthma and Subsistence-Fishing Hazards in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, supplement 2 (April 2002): 245.

3 A community group spent several months: Ibid.

4 Once, seventy miles of streams: Eric W. Sanderson and Marianne Brown, “Mannahatta: An Ecological First Look at the Manhattan Landscape Prior to Henry Hudson,” Northeastern Naturalist, 14(4), 2007, 545.

5 the lobby of an apartment building: Nick Paumgarten, “The Mannahatta Project,” The New Yorker, October 1, 2007.

6 “When my sister picked me up”: Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (San Diego: Harvourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 272.

7 “The bulk of the water in New York Harbor”: Joseph Mitchell, “The Bottom of the Harbor,” Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 465.

8 A vast underground lake of contamination: Daphne Eviatar, “The Ooze,” New York Magazine, June 3, 2007.

9 “Like the Blob”: Ibid.

10 “Exceedingly refreshing”: Edward Neufville Tailer Diaries, May 26, 1848; June 3, 15, 17, 24, 1848; New-York Historical Society.

11 a survey of industry along the creek noted: Jason Corburn, “Combining Community-Based Research and Local Knowledge to Confront Asthma and Subsistence-Fishing Hazards in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, supplement 2 (April 2002): 242.

12 “It is not possible to describe”: Jasper Danckaerts, “Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679–1680.”

13 “I had to try some of them raw”: Ibid., 51.

14 In his day, tuna, perch, sturgeon: Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 9. Also Meta F. Janowitz, “Indian Corn and Dutch Pots: Seventeenth-Century Foodways in New Amsterdam/New York,” Historical Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1993).

15 “With all the interlacing of waterways”: Anthony Hiss, “Love Among the Ruins,” The New Yorker, March 17, 1980.

16 They built homes facing the water: Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 106.

17 The original charter for the Trinity Church: Stokes 1915–1928, quoted in Eric W. Sanderson and Marianne Brown, “Mannahatta: An Ecological First Look at the Manhattan Landscape Prior to Henry Hudson.” Northeastern Naturalist 14, no. 4 (2007).