Franklin Ave. cleanup site was once home of beer brewing collective who fought monopoly

November 7, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

This display ad from the Jan. 2, 1900, Brooklyn Eagle announces the opening of the Consumer’s Park Brewery. Graphic by Brooklyn Eagle

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CROWN HEIGHTS — A vacant site at Franklin and Montgomery streets that will soon undergo environmental cleanup was once a popular beer brewery complex and then a spice factory. The Consumer’s Park Brewery opened at Franklin Ave. and Montgomery St. in the winter of 1900, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of Jan. 2, 1900. The Brewery was originally founded in 1897 as a consortium of saloon keepers who were trying to break a monopoly of men who were controlling the industry at the time. A thousand saloon keepers were expected to move their business dealings from that trust to the new Consumer’s Brewing Company; at least two of those founders had business addresses at 189 Montague St. in Brooklyn Heights.

“The Consumer’s Park Brewing Company is an attack on the handful of men who control the brewing business,” a Jan. 13, 1898, Brooklyn Eagle article read. “The rank and file of stockholders of the new company will be the saloon keepers who say they are tired of being dictated to, as to what they shall do or not do. It was this spirit that caused the new company to be organized. The company will manufacture beer and the one thousand stockholders will purchase it which, if there were no other income, ought to guarantee its success.”

The company merged with another brewery in 1913. Some 110 years after that merger, an environmental cleanup of the site is underway so it can be re-developed as an apartment complex.

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