The Rich History of 650 First Avenue
(Excerpted from an article written by Ken Quaas, a one-time Kips Bay resident)
In 1894 the Kips Bay Brewing Company was launched by an Irishman named Patrick Skelly, at the site now known as 650 First Avenue. Located in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, which runs through streets of the east 20s and 30s. The area is named for Dutch settler Jacobus Kip who owned a farm in the 1600s near what is today 30th Street and the East River.
In the 1800s, this area of the city was filled to create precious land for a growing population. It was on this landfill that the Kips Bay Brewery was constructed, at First Avenue between 37th and 38th Streets. It was one of many breweries on the island of Manhattan at the time.
At his new brewery, Patrick Skelly made lager to satisfy his German customers, as well as porter and ale to suit the tastes of his fellow Irish immigrants. The small brewery prospered under Skelly and when he died in 1908 leaving a million dollar fortune, his son Hugh took the helm. According to the New York Times, Kips Bay Brewing was “more or less a neighborhood facility with a small but loyal following among patrons of restaurants and saloons in an area defined by the range of its horse drawn delivery wagons.” Kips had a small tap room, open to workers and their friends.
Cheating prohibition
Kips Bay sold enough beer to thrive until Prohibition. Unlike most of the breweries in Manhattan, it survived until Repeal. Skelly and his subordinates concocted an elaborate scheme to smuggle that product through a steel doorway that was cleverly disguised to look like a brick wall. He and his crew were famously caught in 1928 and their brewing equipment was impounded by federal agents. Sadly, the feds found and destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of full-strength product.
During the 1920s era of Prohibition, residential real estate was soaring in Manhattan and to make way for new apartment buildings, much of the east side’s brewery row was decimated.
All except one – The Kips Bay Brewing, which remained in business until 1947 and unlike the other fallen Manhattan brewery structures, the Kips Bay building somehow survived fully intact, and was later sold and repurposed as offices.
Built to last
Like other breweries constructed in the late 1800s, the Kips Bay structure is built like a fortress. It has walls three feet thick and floors strong enough to bear the weight of heavy brewing equipment. “We thought we might have some trouble when we put in some computer equipment,” one large tenant told the New York Times about the old brewery in 1977—thirty years after its original re-purposing.
“We weren’t sure the floors of such an old building could take the weight. Then we found that it had a capacity of about 150 pounds per square foot—about twice the weight of most new buildings.”
In the early 2000’s, the nearly 125-year-old brewery building survived yet another expansive renewal, when it was taken over by New York University, which spent millions in developing an extensive medical complex in the Kips Bay neighborhood. With its decorative domes intact, the former Kips Bay Brewing Co. still faces 1st Avenue between East 37th and 38th Streets, just as it first did when horse drawn wagons filled with kegs first left its huge doors.
