Many of the buildings along Flushing Avenue between Marcy and Tompkins Avenues are emblazoned with signs denoting the Pfizer Company. The drug manufacturer was opened by Charles Pfizer and cousin Charles Erhart in 1849 on Flushing Avenue, with its first product being santonin, a drug originally used to expel roundworms from the system. It moved its main headquarters to Maiden Lane downtown in 1868; it has frequently moved around since and has branches worldwide. Its production of citric acid in 1880 became its main business for decades; Pfizer pioneered the production of penicillin in 1941. It would become the world’s #1 maker of the new wonder drug during World War II. Among the well-known brand-name drugs produced by Pfizer today are Advil, Celebrex, Lipitor, Viagra, Xanax and Zoloft. Today the complex is home to “artisanal” food producers and schools. Pfizer sold its Brooklyn properties in 2011.
Pfizer is one of two giants in the pharmaceutical industry to be headquartered in Brooklyn, the second being Bristol Meyers Squibb, founded by Edward Robinson Squibb in Brooklyn Heights in 1858.
Pfizer was prominent in the news in 2020, as along with Moderna it was the first pharmaceutical company to successfully develop a vaccine for the Covid 19 coronavirus. Distribution began in December 2020.
Pfizer buildings are shown in this 1929 Belcher Hyde map excerpt. The buildings along Gerry and Wallabout Streets are no longer there, but Pfizer buildings on the north and south sides of Flushing Avenue remain.
Much more over at the Bowery Boys.
Check out the ForgottenBook, take a look at the gift shop, and as always, “comment…as you see fit.”
12/16/20
6 comments
A relative of mine was a Pfizer sales representative in Connecticut for several years. He called on doctors’ offices to extol the benefits of the company’s new drugs and give information on their proper use. He made pretty good money, unfortunately it came to an end when drugmakers began hiring hot young women, your basic sorority/cheerleader types, to make the sales calls. He ended up as a drug store pharmacist, still decent money but far less glamorous.
Pfizer’s gone from Brooklyn but its headquarters is on 42nd Street near Grand Central.
The crossed retorts of the Pfizer trademark is also the symbol of the Army Chemical Corps.Motto:”Elements rule the battlefield”
The Chemical Corps logo predates the building by 23 years, the Army adopted the logo in 1918 while the research and administration building was built in 1940…there is likely no coincidence between the two: the blue is VERY similar to the Chemical Corps’s own cobalt blue color, and Pfizer was heavily involved in research for the US Army in WWI and the buildup to WWII
I was wondering what those were! They seemed a bit vague! Thanks for that!
ironically you’ve probably seen their successors somewhere: alcohol stills, particularly moonshine stills. Those are just large, semi-complex retorts.
and the reason for you not noticing them before is simple: they were already obsolete when they were erected on the building, retorts like those haven’t been used in chemistry since the early 1910s
John Smith (1889-1950), a Pfizer executive who rose to President and Chairman of the Board before he died in 1950, was a part owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the years before he died. Unfortunately, the Dodgers and Pfizer are both no longer in Brooklyn.