Move over, Milwaukee. Step aside, St. Louis. We’re paying tribute to another American brewing capital: Brooklyn.
BROOKLYN BORN AND BREWED
Between the 1840s and Prohibition in 1920, there were at least 35—some say as many as 50—breweries in Brooklyn.
In Williamsburg and Bushwick alone, a dozen of them dotted a 12-block section that became known as Brewer’s Row (Scholes and Meserole streets from Bushwick Avenue to Lorimer Street). Heavy, British-style ales came first. Later, German immigrants introduced their own style of Bavarian lager. But for all the popularity of Brooklyn beers, even big brand names like Rheingold and Schaefer, they never could compete with national brands, so they remained regional favorites.
MY BEER IS RHEINGOLD
Of all the beers brewed in Brooklyn, Rheingold was the one people knew best, thanks to a ubiquitous ad slogan, “My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer.” By the 1950s, the phrase had been turned into a jingle that played all over New York City’s TV and radio stations. The brand was introduced by the Leibmann family—father Samuel and sons Joseph, Charles, and Henry—who came to Brooklyn from Bavaria around 1850. Soon after, they opened their first brewery on Meserole Street, and then moved to expanded facilities at Forrest and Bremen streets in Bushwick 1855.
Expert marketers, Rheingold hired a list of celebrity endorsers that would make today’s promoters foam with envy: Groucho Marx, John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Kelly, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Carmen Miranda, and many more. In 1956, when The Nat King Cole Show—the first successful TV variety program to feature a black host—had trouble finding sponsors, Rheingold signed on. When the New York Mets set out to fill the baseball gap created after the turncoat Dodgers and Giants fled to California, Rheingold was among the team’s charter sponsors. The Miss Rheingold competition, held annually from 1941 to 1964, generated millions of votes from the public, occasionally outpacing national elections. The beauty contest also attracted a number of young women who became Hollywood stars, including Hope Lange and Tippi Hedren. (Neither won the title.) Competition was tough: In the 1948 Miss Rheingold contest, Grace Kelly didn’t even make the final cut.
“WHEN YOU’RE HAVING MORE THAN ONE”
The Bavarian-style lager beer introduced by the F. & M. Schaefer brewing company in the 1840s was a revelation to New York beer drinkers. “Its merits were many,” wrote the New York Times in 1885, “including vivacity, brilliancy, and coolness, without the ‘gummy,’ soporific, and changeable characteristics of ale.”
Light, thirst-quenching Schaefer quickly became, as its slogan said, “the one beer to have when you’re having more than one.” And beer drinkers did indeed have more than one. In 1885 Schaefer was brewing 150,000 barrels a year, in 1938 the company passed the million-barrel mark, and in 1944 it produced two million barrels a year. Not bad for a business started by two kids from Germany.
Frederick and Maximilian Schaefer immigrated to New York in the 1830s. After working at a brewery in Manhattan for a couple of years, they bought it in 1842. Frederick was 25 years old; Maximilian was 23. They built new facilities on Seventh Avenue and 17th Street, and then moved uptown to Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue) and 51st Street, where the company headquarters remained for 67 years before it relocated to Kent Avenue in Brooklyn. (St. Bartholomew’s Church and the Waldorf-Astoria were built on Park Avenue sites once owned by Schaefer.)
As Schaefer expanded, its production branched out to Pennsylvania and Maryland. But by the 1970s, sales had dropped and the big Brooklyn plant was no longer a jewel in the company crown. Schaefer announced it would close the plant in 1976, just a week after Rheingold revealed it was closing its own Brooklyn facility. Thus, the reign of the big-time Brooklyn breweries came to an end.
HONORABLE MENTION: MCSORLEY’S
This one’s not in Brooklyn, but old-time New York drinking establishments don’t get more old-timey than McSorley’s Old Ale House at 15 East 7th Street in Manhattan. The place has been going strong since John McSorley opened the doors in 1854.Abraham Lincoln drank there. Woody Guthrie sang there. E.E. Cummings wrote a poem about it. But for the bar’s first 116 years, if you wanted that old-time experience and you happened to be a woman, you were out of luck. McSorley’s didn’t have a lot of rules, but “no ladies” was one of them. Even when the bar was owned by a woman, which it was from 1939 to 1974, women didn’t drink there. The owner, Dorothy O’Connell Kirwan, who inherited the place from her father, only came in on Sundays after the bar was closed. Finally, in 1970, a judge’s ruling forced McSorley’s to let women in. (It took another 16 years for a women’s restroom to be installed.)
First Ivy League school to admit female students: Cornell University.
The other rule at McSorley’s—one that remains essentially unbroken—is that the bar serves only ale. No wine, no cosmopolitans or appletinis, no light beer or lager. Just McSorley’s ale—in light and dark varieties, served two at a time in half-pint glasses. Fidelio Brewery on First Avenue and 29th Street brewed the first ales for McSorley’s, but today they’re brewed by Pabst. And while you can buy McSorley’s in bottles now, nothing compares to hoisting a cold one at the ale house itself.
Frank Sinatra’s 1980 version of “New York, New York” may be the best-known song about the Big Apple, but Sinatra wasn’t the first to sing it. Liza Minnelli sang “New York, New York” in Martin Scorsese’s 1977 film of the same title. The song was written for the film by Fred Ebb and composed by John Candor, and in the years since, it’s been covered by countless other artists in various genres, including Queen, Sammy Davis Jr., Phish, Michael Bublé, and Devin Townsend, who did a heavy-metal version for a compilation album called SIN-atra.
The song, which captures the pride and spirit of the “city that never sleeps,” is played regularly during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, in Times Square on New Year’s Day just after the ball drops, and at the end of every home game in Yankee Stadium—Sinatra’s version when they win; Minnelli’s version when they lose.
Before Zane Grey wrote bestselling Westerns, he was a dentist in Manhattan.