On a rare clear weekend day in February, I strolled through Williamsburg, a neighborhood I have had a hard time getting a handle on as it is ever-changing; when I began FNY in the 1990s, it was shedding its sleepy backwater image and hipping it up quickly. With a major zoning change in 2005, real money began pouring in and it got expensive and forced the hipsters east into places like Bushwick and Ridgewood. New construction commenced and continues apace today.
I look for the ‘good stuff” which for me is the old stuff. Here’s the American Beverage Building, #118 North 11th, which, as its painted sign said, was “famous for purity and excellence.” What kind of beverages were produced here, I haven’t time to delve into records for (help me in Comments). It was longstanding, having been established in 1862, at the beginning years of the Civil War. the year the Civil War broke out.
By some miracle, the AmBev Building (as they’d call it today) has survived mostly intact from that 1940 photo. It has an iron exterior and some of the faded paint on it can still be made out, especially the “office” and #118 signs.
Today, the building is mixed-use, with a legit massage “parlor” on the ground floor. I can’t tell from the 1940 photo, but the interesting window pane arrangement may also be the same from back then.
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6/24/24