Beer and an imagination running rampant

Louisville was the inspiration for the following rumination, which I wrote some time back, but New Albany's history parallels it. Our most famous brewery was Paul Reising's, located on what is now West Spring Street at the current site of the Holiday Inn Express. Reising's brewery didn't have its own tap room or pub, but a tavern called Armbruster's across the street served the brewery's beer and doubled as the unofficial welcoming center for incoming German immigrants. The brewery ceased operations prior to the Great War, although there was a short-lived post-Prohibition revival in the same building. The tavern building was demolished to make way for Interstate 64.

I am emerging from a horse-drawn streetcar onto a cobblestone alley shaded by huge trees that block the summertime heat and humidity. My fellow travelers wear jackets and ties, carry newspapers, and talk about baseball, politics and the girl (or boy) next door. Many of us are walking in the same direction, around the corner from the trolley stop, and with each step toward the gates of a huge complex of brick buildings that occupy most of the city block before us, clues as to our destination fill the early evening air.

There are voices from the vast open garden atop the hill, and the pungent smell of tobacco hanging like fog around the second story windows. My nose twitches uncontrollably with the scents of baking bread, roasting pork and curing kraut. Glasses clink as they are removed from tables, and the mustiness of souring beer in slop buckets pervades the countertops in the staging area, where waiters gather to collect glasses of fresh brew drawn from massive wooden barrels, then scatter ant-like to serve them to people seated at the oversized tables.

Across the railing, looking west, there is a heaving vista of church steeples, clattering train yards, staid commercial structures, and the respiration of the city. I’ve been to this place numerous times, and when the wind is curling down from the river, the stockyards seem a lot closer than they actually are.

I sit across from an old man with a flowing white beard, and the crisply attired server heeds my instructions to the letter, cutting and depositing a sleek, chocolate-colored Havana before me, and pushing a foaming mug of house beer across the table. The old man points to a pin on his chest, and in heavily accented English that bears the traces of his European upbringing decades before, regales me with stories of the Civil War.

Much later, after my new friend Friedrich has stumbled home to soak the stump where his peg leg rests … it was a Minie ball in Nashville in 1864 … and the bones of a whole chicken are mingled with the ashes of the spent cigar … after I’ve had more servings of the dark and tangy Kommon beer than I intended … a brass band takes to the stand and begins playing sentimental versions of the popular marches and waltzes that play constantly in my head, even when I’m not drinking.

There’s a girl across the way. Do you think she’d like to dance? Doesn’t matter, because I never do. Wouldn’t know where to put my feet, but maybe she doesn’t care. Or maybe the best bet would be to have another. There are no more streetcars running, anyway, so it stands to be a long walk home. If I’d have brought my bicycle …

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It was while riding my bike in the year 2002 that these thoughts were prompted. Peddling uphill on Baxter Avenue, I stopped to inspect the old building that now houses Acme Auto Electric.

As explained by Conrad Selle and Peter Guetig in their “Louisville Breweries” book, this particular structure is all that remains of the renowned Phoenix Brewery. It was part of the brewery stables. Adjacent to the brewery was the Phoenix Hill Park, site of the beer garden, a wooded area, a bandstand, dance hall, bike track, and bowling alley. Long before Oldenberg or BrewWorks set forth the idea of an “entertainment complex,” there was one in Louisville, sprawling from the corner of Baxter and Barret.

As noted in “Louisville Breweries,” the brewery and the park were situated on a hilltop, which was leveled along with most of the rest of the complex in the late 1930s. Originally the hill afforded an unimpeded view of downtown, and must have been spectacular in its day. The Spezial brewery’s lovely, scenic, hilltop beer garden in Bamberg, Germany springs to mind when I try to picture the ambience of Phoenix Hill Park in Louisville, circa 1900.

We have nothing like it now, and yet we insist on believing that we’ve made “progress.” Taken in context, it’s a funny notion.

You’ve probably driven past Acme Auto Electric many times and may have glimpsed the colorful murals that decorate the exterior of the former Phoenix outbuilding. The murals depict century-old scenes of the brewery and the park, including the bicycle races and a long-forgotten speech in the dancehall by Theodore Roosevelt. There is a plat plan of the area that shows just how large the brewery and park area was, and upon further reflection, it seems a shame that something as relentlessly tawdry as the current Phoenix Hill Tavern should bear the same name as the brewery and park of old.

The reality depicted in these paintings might just as easily be from another planet as from the Louisville of 2002, but the vicissitude of human nature probably differs little from what was on display a century before. There is something universal in the thoughts and feeling engendered by a brewery and a beer garden, and something that unites generations, especially if the beer is locally brewed, distinctive and unique.

The person sitting across from you now may be Friedrich’s great, great grandson.

Hard to believe? Just have another one, and it will become clearer and clearer.