Friday, October 13, 2023 – A RELIC OF THE PAST AND A GREAT PLACE TO HAVE A BEER

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OUR HEARTS GO OUR TO OUR FRIENDS, FAMILIES AND NEIGHBORS IN ISRAEL

FROM THE ARCHIVES

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13,  2023

What the 1910s Stained Glass

Windows

Say About a 19th century

Brooklyn Tavern

ISSUE#  1099

EPHEMERAL NEW YORK

What the 1910s stained glass windows say about a 19th century Brooklyn tavern

With its tin ceiling, mosaic tile floor, and handsome mahogany bar, Teddy’s Bar and Grill is like stepping into a late 19th century time machine.

This corner tavern on Berry and North Eighth Streets in Williamsburg opened in 1887 as a family-run Irish tavern, according to Teddy’s website. At the time, Brooklyn was a separate city and Williamsburg was a working-class district of Irish and German immigrants, many of whom worked along the waterfront a few blocks away in sugar refineries and other industrial plants.

Take a seat at the bar inside, and you can almost imagine the flickering gas lamps softly illuminating the barroom, and men—only men, as women were not welcome in taverns at the time—coming by for growlers of beer and community.

Outside the bar, there’s one aspect of Teddy’s that I couldn’t take my eyes off: the multicolor stained-glass windows above the entrance. It’s not unusual to see stained glass like this in an old-school New York bar—delicately wrought with gorgeous colors and design motifs.

But the words emblazoned across the front intrigued me: “Peter Doelger’s Extra Beer.” Who is Peter Doelger? The answer lies in the next chapter of Teddy’s, after it traded hands in 1911.

“The place was purchased by a Bavarian German immigrant named Peter Doelger who was one of New York’s most successful brewers,” explains a 2018 post from the Greenpointers website.

“Doelger, who had started a brewery on the Lower East Side in 1859, is largely responsible for introducing lager beer into New York. The New York Sun wrote that before Doelger opened his Lower East Side brewery, lager beer, in the brewing of which he was to make a fortune, was an exotic and unappreciated drink…a mysterious German drink, as remote from most of the community as pulque or vodka is today.’”

By the 1910s, Doelger’s brewery operated on East 55th Street near the East River. He “was looking to purchase New York bars as an outlet his beers, so his establishment exclusively served Doelger’s brews,” states Greenpointers.

The stained-glass windows are over a century old, but they’re a good 30 years younger than the bar’s other anachronisms, like the tin ceiling and interior woodwork.

Doelger died in 1912, and his brewery, run by his sons, shut down for good in 1947. Teddy’s (above in 1940) entered a new era after it was bought by Teddy and Mary Prusik, who renamed the bar in the 1950s, per Teddy’s website.

The Prusicks were Polish immigrants, and at the time they purchased the bar, the north side of Williamsburg had become a Polish enclave, according to Greenpointers.

The couple operated the tavern until 1987, when it was sold to new owners who added a kitchen and a dining room in an old carriage house next door, states Teddy’s.

In 2015, Teddy’s landed its current owners, and the clientele tends to reflect the demographics of Williamsburg in the 21st century. It’s a bar with a wonderful old-school vibe, but I wonder if the name of a 19th century beer baron in glass above the entrance holds any weight.

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THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

Rough sketches of Roosevelt Island by Edward Hopper
I saw them at the Whitney exhibit –which was gorgeous!
I actually went back to the exhibit several times….;^)
(I know you saw & enjoyed that exhibit as well)
THOM HEYER

CREDITS

Judith Berdy

EPHEMERAL NEW YORK

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