Lion Brewery
c. 1875
N. F. Rosenberg (active 1875)
Oil on canvas, 33 3/4 X 50
Signed lower left: N. F. Rosenberg
Gift of Paula Murray (Mrs. Frederic R. Coudert, Jr.), 43.227

 

New Yorkers had been quenching their thirst with English-style beer since Colonial times. As water quality deteriorated in the rapidly growing city, however, so did the flavor of the drink. The opening of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842 brought not only a safer water supply to the city but also a significantly improved taste to its water and the beverages made from it. In 1850 August Schmid and Emanuel Bernheimer, recently arrived from Germany, established the Costanz Brewery at East 4th Street near Avenue B, filling the demand of their fellow immigrants for the familiar lager beer of their homeland. By 1852, the great success of that enterprise encouraged them to build a second Costanz Brewery at Four Corners in Staten Island, then home to a sizable community of German immigrants. Eight years later, Bernheimer became the partner of another German immigrant, James Speyers, in his Lion Brewery, established in 1857.¹

The Lion Brewery, depicted here, occupied a site bounded by Eighth and Tenth Avenues (today, Eighth Avenue becomes Central Park West north of 57th Street, and at the same point Tenth becomes Amsterdam Avenue) and extending from 107th to 109th Streets. The background view includes Central Park, with a glimpse of the Blockhouse, a relic from the War of 1812. During this period, Manhattan's Upper West Side, a relatively open area offering inexpensive land, accommodated numerous public institutions, among them the adjacent Leake and Watts orphanage at 110th Street and Broadway and the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum at 116th Street and Broadway (now part of the Columbia University campus). Also clustered in the neighborhood were the shanty homes of at least five thousand people (and perhaps as many as ten thousand) displaced by the formal opening of Central Park in 1859. The combination of shanties, public institutions, and such foul-smelling industries as breweries explains why the Upper West Side failed to develop the real estate value of other areas bordering Central Park until the early twentieth century.

The imposition of a one-dollar tax on each barrel of American-made beer, marking the establishment of the Internal Revenue Act in 1862, helped to finance the Union government during the Civil War and drove many small breweries out of business.² Larger operations, such as the Lion, flourished through improved financing and marketing and by encouraging the saloons that were licensed to sell their beer to become cleaner and more attractive. The Lion continued to operate at the 107th Street site until 1941, when the business folded. Today, apartment houses occupy the brewery's former location. Rosenberg's painting is valuable for the record it provides of a time when the Upper West Side was home to one of Manhattan's major manufacturing establishments and not the densely populated neighborhood it is today.

The New York City directory of 1875 lists a Frederick Rosenberg, painter, living at 115 East 118th Street. He may have been the artist of this work, but no other information about the artist's identity has surfaced.

Notes:

  1  One Hundred Years of Brewing (New York: H. S. Rich, 1903), p. 246.

  2  Stanley Baron, Brewed in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), p. 213.