At #354 Bowery between East 3rd and 4th, a road that somehow resists all efforts of local developers to tame it despite the construction of numerous high-rise glass-walled apartment buildings as well as the New Museum, which looks like six metal mesh pencil holders from Staples stacked on top of each other, is a repurposed Hershey’s Ice Cream illuminated sign now marking the location of Hecho en Dumbo (Made in Dumbo), a Mexican restaurant relocated from that Brooklyn neighborhood. Formerly, the sign was lit by electric lamps within.
The Hershey Creamery Company was founded in 1894 by Jacob and his four brothers, Isaac, Paris, Ephraim, and Eli Hershey (no relation to Milton S. Hershey of the Hershey [Chocolate] Company).
5/18/15
3 comments
From what I’ve read, Hershey’s Ice Cream is not associated with Hershey Chocolate. Currently, it comes out of Middletown, NY in Orange County, currently called Herco Distributing. It appears to be part of: http://www.hersheyicecream.com/aboutus.html
Hershey’s Creamery and Hershey’s Chocolate are completely unrelated companies with only the founders last names in common. They have been in and out of court suing each other for 75 years because of the confusion.
Yup. And probably 90% of their customers don’t realize the two companies are separate. I certainly didn’t when I was growing up and eagerly consumed the products of both. The painted-over lettering on the sign shown here looks awfully similar to the lettering on a Hershey bar, too. They say the founders of the two companies were unrelated, but I wonder. I read somewhere that they came from the same town in Germany. Two unrelated families with the same last name in the same town? Probably there was some relationship some generations back from the founders, that they didn’t keep track of. Unless the name is related to the town itself, but I don’t think it is.