Beer of Broadway Fame , livre ebook

Beer of Broadway Fame
Beer of Broadway Fame
The Piel Family and Their Brooklyn Brewery
ALFRED W. McCOY
Cover Credit: Brooklynpix.com ; B. Merlis and R. Gomes, Brooklyn’s East New York and Cypress Hill Communities .
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Excelsior Editions is an imprint of State University of New York Press
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCoy, Alfred W., author.
Beer of Broadway fame : the Piel family and their Brooklyn brewery / Alfred W. McCoy.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-6140-3 (paperback : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-6141-0 (e-book)
1. Piel family. 2. McCoy, Alfred W.—Family. 3. Piel’s Beer (Firm)—History. 4. Breweries—New York (State)—New York—History. I. Title.
TP573.5.A1M35 2016 663’.309747—dc23 2015036570
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Those Piels Who Brought the Family Business into the Third Generation
Frederick Lange
Gerard Piel
Margarita Piel McCoy
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: The Piel Family
Chapter 2: Brooklyn Brewery
Chapter 3: Incorporation
Chapter 4: Prologue to Prohibition
Chapter 5: The Great War
Chapter 6: Prohibition
Chapter 7: Repeal
Chapter 8: Purging Piels from Piel Bros.
Chapter 9: Corporate Expansion
Chapter 10: Demise
Chapter 11: Third Generation
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Images 1.1 Lake Parlin, Maine, Summer of 1940, Margarita “Peggy” Piel. 2.1 Gottfried Piel, Düsseldorf, circa 1890. 2.2 Barn, Heermann Hof, Herne, Germany, 1937. 2.3 Maria Heermann Piel, circa 1890. 2.4 Michael Piel, circa 1890. 2.5 Lanzer Brewery, purchased by Piel Bros., East New York, circa 1883. 3.1 Piel Bros. Stock Certificate, 1898. 3.2 Federal Brewing Company of Brooklyn, circa 1902. 3.3 Piel family, Brooklyn, 1895. 3.4 Advertisement for sale of Piel residence, Manhattan, circa 1918. 3.5 Dining room, Piel home, 245 W. 72nd Street, New York, circa 1907. 4.1 Label for Piel’s Lager Beer, circa 1917. 4.2 Piel estate at Lake Parlin, Maine, beneath Mt. Coburn, 1920. 4.3 Main house at Parlin Pond Inn, Maine, circa 1930.
Photo Gallery: The Piel Family 5.1 Postcard from Maria Piel to son Paul in Naples, Italy, February 1915. 5.2 Dr. Armin St. George, U.S. Army Medical Corps, World War I. 5.3 Mathilde, Erwin, and Julia Lange, East Prussia, circa 1904. 5.4 Mathilde Lange, circa 1918. 5.5 Dr. Mathilde Lange, Wheaton College, Massachusetts, circa 1930. 5.6 Dr. Mathilde Lange, protesting the Vietnam War, Monroe, New York, 1971. 6.1 Label for Piel’s near beer during Prohibition. 6.2 German Papiermark currency for two million marks, issued in 1923. 7.1 Label for Piel’s Light Lager Beer, after Prohibition, circa 1934. 7.2 Piel Bros. beer coaster with Germanic elf theme, 1934. 8.1 Maria Piel’s ticket on the Hamburg-America Line, 1937. 8.2 Piel Bros. beer coaster with Broadway star Ethel Merman, circa 1948.
Photo Gallery: Brooklyn’s Breweries 9.1 Label for Trommer’s Malt Beer, Brooklyn, New York, circa 1934. 9.2 Rudolf Piel feeding bull clover at Piel Ranch, Fort Myers, Florida, 1952. 9.3 Label for Rubsam Horrmann Bock Beer, Staten Island, post-Prohibition. 9.4 Label for Piel’s Light Beer from the Staten Island plant, mid-1950s. 9.5 Bert and Harry Piel beer coaster, 1956. 10.1 Label for Drewrys Ale, Chicago, Illinois, post-Prohibition. 11.1 William Piel at the wedding of his daughter Mary, 1937. 11.2 Louise Piel Lange visiting Heermann Hof, Herne, Germany, 1953.
Figures Figure 1 Descendants of Jakob Piel Figure 2 Piels’ Beverage Production (in Standard Barrels of 31 Gallons), 1884 to 1961 Figure 3 Organization of Piel Bros. Brewery as Family Business, 1934 Figure 4 The Process of Brewing Beer at Piel Bros., Brooklyn, 1959
Map Map 1 Piel Bros. Sales Territory Showing Percentage of Local Markets, 1960
Tables Table 4.1 Impact of 1907 Boycott by New York Brewers on Piel’s Draught Sales (in Barrels), 1903–1914 Table 6.1 Piel’s Sales By-the-Glass at Plant, Bottled Beer, and Soft Drinks, 1900–1932 Table 9.1 Top Thirty U.S. Breweries, including Five in New York, 1953 (in Barrels of 31 Gallons Each) Table 10.1 Piel’s Production, Income, Profit (Loss), and Dividends, 1933–1961
Acknowledgments
The fifteen years spent researching and writing this book were an extraordinary voyage of discovery, not of a distant land or into a long-forgotten past, but of something as close as my own family. This book started as an antiquarian project, morphed into a social history, and wound up in my preferred scholarly terrain, the shadowy netherworld of covert operations. Instead of the roster of names and dates that are the stuff of most genealogical histories, I found a hidden past of espionage, state surveillance, family intrigues, and personal betrayals.
Every history stands or falls upon the quality of its documentation, and this one is certainly no exception. The feasibility of the entire project rested upon the care that many Piel family members took with inherited papers and photos that became warp and weft for weaving this history. I am grateful, more than I can say, to the third-generation Piels for this invaluable service—including, Marie-Luise Kemp for preserving her parents’ photos; David Piel, who wrote up memorable anecdotes that liven several chapters; Mark Piel, who found family papers and rare photos; Rollo Lange who shared memories; Daniel Piel who sent photos; and, particularly, Eleanor Jackson Piel for sorting out the Piel brewery’s papers in a musty Brooklyn storage locker; and her husband Gerard Piel who believed deeply in this project and supported it generously with time, personal papers, and professional contacts.
Although Gerard’s older brother William Piel, Jr., a renowned litigator, died before I started this research, his name was sufficient to open the voluminous Piel Bros. records at the Wall Street law firm Sullivan Cromwell, counsel to the brewery for a full quarter-century. My long day-into-night reading of piles of these files in Conference Room C on the thirty-fourth floor of 125 Broad Street, as liveried waiters served coffee and clerks delivered stacks of immaculate photocopies, remains one of the most memorable events in a decade’s research.
A descendant on matriarch Maria’s side of the family, Christian Heermann, transcribed family letters from the old German fractuer handwriting and shared his histories of the Heermann Hof, Maria Piel’s ancestral home at Herne in North Rhine–Westphalia. But, above all, I am grateful to my mother Margarita Piel McCoy for both the childhood stories that inspired this project and her invaluable interviews throughout the long years of research and writing.
The Piels of my own fourth generation were both helpful and critical—helpful with the research and critical of the time it took me to complete this demanding project. I am grateful to Tommy Kemp for access to family artifacts stored at his farm in northern Maine; Weezy Kemp Ringle and Steve Ringle for help with the photography and genealogy; Bia Piel, for introducing me to the literature on therapy for families in business together; Jonathan Piel, who kindly shared media contacts in connection with the Bruno Bettelheim story; Tony Piel, who both provided documents and defended me before the family as other writing projects claimed my time; and, above all, Olga Lange, for her careful curating of family papers and meticulous scanning of the many photos stored at her Lake Parlin cottage. My eldest son Matthew drew the genealogy and the brewery’s organizational chart, skillfully rendering both complexities visually comprehensible. Finally, my sister Margarita Candace Ground typed many of the lengthy oral history transcripts and cast a critical eye over the manuscript’s penultimate draft.
Several long-time employees of the family’s firms were generous with their expertise, including Leonard Lazarus who was counselor to the Piel family for over sixty years, as well as the key advisers to the current family business M G Piel Securities, accountant Jerry Salomone and financial adviser Harvey Ross.
Beyond the family, colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison were quite helpful, including Matt Gildner, who did research in the U.S. National Archives; Maureen Justiniano, who scanned many of the 1,600 images collected for the project; Judy Vezzetti, who did genealogical research during breaks from her duties as the chair’s secretary in the History Department; Anne Bailey and Marta-Laura Suska, who finished some challenging German translations; Erin Hardacker, who edited an early draft and compiled the bibliography; and Nancy Mulhern, the knowledgeable Government Documents Librarian at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, for searches into nineteenth-century beer production and the records of the Senate Internal Security Committee.
Elsewhere Zeph Stickney, archivist at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, sent documents about Mathilde Lange’s career as a faculty member; while school archivists Ruth Qua