Several years ago, when I was a new librarian, the Humanities and History Division went on a field trip to the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library. We were shown around and given in-depth tours of the Milstein Division of US History, Local History and Genealogy, as well as the Map Division. Matt Knutzen, the Map Librarian, had pulled out a wealth of historical maps for us, including some of Morningside Heights before Columbia’s arrival. There was one map that indicated property ownership, and it was then that I noticed the Lion Brewery, just east southeast of where the university now stands.
I remember wondering which came first: the Lion Brewery, or the Columbia Lions? It was a question that niggled at the back of my mind all these years, without my ever doing a thing about investigating it–but when it came time to choose a building to research, the brewery was the first thing that occurred to me.
The Lion Brewery was a massive operation, spanning two uptown and one crosstown block. In a December 1891 article in The Evening World, describing the $82.45 that brewery employees raised for the newspaper’s Christmas-tree fund, the address is given merely as 109th Street and 9th Avenue (now Columbus). The brewery proprietor at the time was a Mr Simon E Bernheimer, of Bernheimer & Schmid, but by July 1903, The Evening World was reporting that Mrs Josephine Schmid was buying out her partners, the Bernheimer brothers, to become the sole proprietor of the brewery, then valued at $5,000,000 and producing half a million barrels of beer a year. Mrs Schmid owned fifty saloons, and was known as the ‘Brewery Queen;’ the Lion Brewery was then the second largest brewery in the east.
The brewery was adjoined by Lion Brewery Park, which spread from 107th to 108th Streets along Columbus Avenue (more details on the Park to come, I hope). An 1859 article in The New York Times, about a large fire at the brewery, claims it was built two years earlier.
The fire was not the brewery’s only brush with drama. In 1865, a murder occurred in the Lion Brewery Park, during a picnic held by the Manhattanville Church of the Annuciation. In 1908, Mrs Schmid’s daughter filed suit against her mother for her share of the profits as set out in the late Mr Schmid’s will. In November 1921, an explosion in an ‘ammonia refrigerating pipe’ on the second floor of the brewery blew out every window on the floor as well as some in neighboring buildings.
I look forward to learning more!
The evening world. (New York, N.Y.), 17 April 1915. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030193/1915-04-17/ed-1/seq-4/
