FYI-,
This is the Illinois Central Lakefront line and looks like they did good business with this former customer. No idea where this was in Chicago but that white cement block building in the background kind of looks familiar. I can’t tell from the skyline where this is exactly…anyone know?
https://i.etsystatic.com/14100656/r/il/eec9ff/1172352824/il_794xN.1172352824_paqq.jpg
Not sure which structure you meian. The Wrigley Building is white, but marble clad. I can also see the Railway Exchange (Santa Fe) Building closer to the camera. The structure in the foreground is IC-related.
The sign is for PBR, but their brewery was Milwaukee.
Believe this is the IC yard near Randolph Street with Michigan Ave. on the left.
That is correct–this is only a large sign, related to nothing else in particular in the scene. Pretty sure the Prudential Building (at one time the tallest in the city) went up on this site in the late 1950s. There are now quite a few buildings between there and the Tribune Tower, visible on the right edge of the sign.
I wonder what “Blended 33 to 1” means. I’m a beer geek, a former beer judge and home brewer but I have never heard a term like that before.
Found the shadow of the Pabst sign in a 1952 aerial photo on Historicaerials.com.
It was near the current location of “Millenium Station.”
Yup…the station, formerly Randolph Sreet Station, is underneath the street and the Prudential Building.
I well remember being up in the observation deck on that buildng and watching IC yard crews kicking cars around in 1964. None of that freight trackage is around any more.
Randolph Street Station (I still call it by that name) lost most of its character when Millenium Park was built over it. The South Shore tracks are now under roof and the wood platforms are long gone.
The title of this thread is in error. It’s only a PBR sign, not a brewery.
More’s the pity! [:'(]
Not a Chicago brew (Milwaukee’s #4, behind Schlitz, Miller Hi-life and Blatz in taste ), and in my opinion and memory, it was regarded as p**s water around Chicago back in the day.
An interesting point is that I believe the “33 to 1” is an artifact of Perlstein’s attempt to make a ‘consistent’ product nationally with production from multiple physical breweries, not just by combining the results of different batches from different kettles in the same brewery. It might be interesting to read the industrial history of how this was executed, as it was said to be one of the first attempts to create a national-scale product with consistent characteristics – see the Waffle House basic menu for another particularly internally-promoted example.
If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, what is a beer produced by committee? I suggest charlie hebdo already knows… [;)]
Yes. Awful House, the Ptomaine (and meth) Palace.
There was a book on A&P and a TV series on Hershey, Kellogg, Heinz. Mars and Post and Mickey Ds. Whatever happened to Burger Chef?
One of the things I studied intensively in marketing was how ‘store brands’ were made and ‘positioned’ over the years – Ann Page being a particular example. It was interesting to see how some organizations either missed the target or ‘left money on the table’ – Pathmark being a particularly amusing example with their ‘cut-rate’ line of discount products that cost just as much to produce and package as many branded lines…
Sometimes the store brands are cost-minimizing, sometimes they reflect regional differences or pride, sometimes they represent an opportunity to go higher-end with better products (see Kroger’s Private Selection and ‘Simple Truth’ brands for example) – things that highly remind me of how intermodal yard operators would be involved with driveaway OTR moves… [:-^]
Very reminiscent in a way of REA. The chain was sold, as I recall to Hardee’s circa 1982, within only a few years of its maximum expansion. Hardee’s converted the better locations to, well, Hardee’s and took to closing the rest. Took them almost a decade and a half to kill it off.
To this day I found their kid’s program more attractive than that '30s-Disneyesque swill at McDonald’s. Of ocurse I also loved ‘Linus the Lion-Hearted’ as a kid in the '60s, so I’m not the poster child for discriminating advertising expediency from fun…
You know, there is a better one, that is used in some contexts at WHU. You do NOT want to run an Offal House…
Hey! I LIKE that place!
How can you NOT like a place where you have to show a pack of cigarettes to get in?
[;)]
OK, for some reason I thought it was a Brewery as well, makes sense if is only a sign.
40 years ago I drank PBR in long-neck 16 oz. bar bottles that came in a heavy brown carton. It was cheap and fresh from a brewery in Newark, N.J. and it tasted a lot better than the PBR you could buy in a 7-11. There were deposits on the bottles long before there was a deposit law in New York and the beer distributor where I bought it demanded them back so they could be sent back to the brewery. I don’t know if that was a Pabst-owned plant or a contract brewer but it closed down after an extended strike in the late 1980s.
The two brothers that ran the distributor had both worked for F. M. Schaefer years before and they lent me a box of “The Blue Book,” a brewers guide book that listed every brewery in North America and some of the books went back to the 1930s. Fascinating reading; it told you where to get barrels, dispensing and brewing vessels and I learned what was involved to get a hopper car of barley delivered or finished beer taken away by box car.
Grab It Here… “Where ma saves pa’s dough” Presumably this grocery chain js now either defunct or changed the name and slogan.
Pick n Save. Shrunk in numbers, but still exists in Milwaukee, I believe.