See The Abandoned Champagne Vault Under The Brooklyn Bridge


Photographer Stanley Greenberg likes to shoot hidden spaces and invisible infrastructure — the overlooked, neglected, or simply off-limits “back-end” of the systems that shape our world. During a conversation at Studio-X NYC last week about his new work — photographs taken behind the scenes of large-scale physics experiments, of which more later — Greenberg briefly discussed the image shown above.

Published in his 1998 book, Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of New York City, the photo shows an abandoned champagne cave built into the anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge. Greenberg’s caption notes that:

For many years the vault pictured here, located under the Manhattan approach to the bridge, was rented to a wine merchant for champagne storage because the temperature changed so little during the year. Other vaults similar to this one contain rusting fallout shelter helmets and casting patterns for the specialized parts of many of the city’s old bridges.

IMAGE: Constructing the anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, via Encyclopedia Branigan.

This hidden vault has surfaced sporadically in the public imagination, beginning with a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article from 1933 (the year Prohibition was repealed) that describes a public ceremony in which the city handed its keys back to wine importers Anthony Oechs & Co.

Alongside equally fascinating stories on forthcoming weddings (one of a Siamese twin, the other of Gilda Gray, “originator  of the shimmy dance”) and the progress of the ladies of the Polish-American track and field team, the Gazette describes passing “through a cave-like door into medieval France,” where “a few hundred lucky citizens” drank champagne and waltzed amidst the “dimly glowing” cases of “rare vintages of the old world,” oblivious to the trolleys, pedestrians, and automobiles racing back and forth fifty feet above their heads.

IMAGE: From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 12, 1934.

Forty-five years later, in 1978, New York magazine returned to the vault, adding detail about its decor and location in an article about the city’s buried treasures:

A space between two arches of the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge was known as the “Blue Grotto” because of a statue of the Madonna that someone placed in a niche to bless the booze. It once held the finest supply of champagne and wine in the city. During Prohibition, the liquor was removed and the vault was used to store rolls of newsprint. On the walls of this vault, which is underneath William Street and Park Row, are fading frescoes and the following wise inscription: WHO LOVETH NOT WINE, WOMEN AND SONG, HE REMAINETH A FOOL HIS WHOLE LIFE LONG.

According to the New York Times, writing in 1999, chambers nestled in the massive granite anchorages on both sides of the East River were rented for wine storage to help offset the $15 million plus that it cost to build the bridge:

City records for 1901, for instance, show that the “Luyties Brothers” paid $5,000 for wine storage in a vault on the Manhattan side. “A. Smith & Company” paid $500 a year from 1901 until 1909 for a vault on the Brooklyn side.

Sadly, these artificial bridge caves are no longer used for wine storage. A spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation told the Times that the vaults now house maintenance materials, although “people call up sometimes and say they’d like to live there.” A slightly over-excited Maxim film critic, taken down to the vault as part of the Sony promotion for the 2009 remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, reports that, in fact, a homeless man did build “some kind of Escape From New York-esque apartment” in the wine cellar, and had to be forcibly evicted by the MTA.

IMAGE: The Brooklyn Bridge wine cellar; photo by Flickr user Pauletto.

Still, as this 2011 photo by Flickr user Pauletto shows, the brick-vaulted, granite-walled cellar is still in reasonably good shape, although the Madonna is nowhere to be seen, and the Pol Roger insignia has faded further since Stanley Greenberg’s visit, a decade before.

Meanwhile, the idea of cellaring fine wine and spirits in the base of New York City’s infrastructural monuments is a poetic one, and, I think, overdue a revival in this era of local, artisanal production. Where better to store Kings County Distillery moonshine or cave-age Brooklyn Brewery’s ales?

For more of New York City’s subterranean alcohol infrastructure, see my 2009 post on the rediscovered and now filled-in Bronx beer caves. And, as a further postscript, Stanley Greenberg’s most recent book Time Machines, includes this incredible image of a disused bubble chamber, the early prototypes of which, as Studio-X NYC regular Albert Chao pointed out to me, were filled with beer.

This post originally appeared at Edible Geography.

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'Angry Birds' Cartoons Coming Soon to a Small Screen Near You

Angry BirdsFirst came the popular smartphone game, with players hurling a variety of birds at fortified pigs. Game sequels followed. Then plush toys. Last year, Angry Birds -- the board game -- was one of the holiday shopping season's biggest sellers.

Now, in Rovio's boldest bet yet, the app developer behind the franchise, will be putting out 52 episodes of an animated Angry Birds series.

Shooting for Small-Screen Stardom

Don't look for Disney (DIS) and Nickelodeon parent Viacom (VIA) to duke it out for broadcasting rights. These 52 weekly installments will be bite-sized clips, averaging roughly three minutes each.

Rovio is aiming at smaller screens, hoping to turn the clips into digital sensations. If it can line up the right partners and score lucrative advertising deals, the massive established audience of Angry Birds fans may make this a more promising route than the traditional television path that proven marketable properties have taken in the past.

How big is Angry Birds? Well, the latest version of the mobile game -- Angry Birds Space -- hit app stores two weeks ago. It immediately vaulted to the top of the download charts, overtaking OMGPOP's Draw Something a day after Zynga (ZNGA) had acquired OMGPOP in a deal reportedly worth about $200 million.

Forget trying to put a price tag on privately held Rovio. All you need to know is that the game was downloaded 10 million times in its first three days on the market.

Rovio has ambitious plans. It plans to roll out another four Angry Birds games later this year.

Will the Birds Land on the Big Screen Next?

It's easy to see where this will go from here. If the games continue to be popular and if the short videos are a hit, a full-blown movie makes perfect sense.

It's usually the other way around: A hit movie will result in merchandising opportunities and video games. This time it's a video game that triggered merchandising deals and now video development initiatives.

No film is publicly in the works, so if it happens, it won't hit theaters until 2015 at the earliest.

That's a long time, especially in the fickle universe of gamers. Casual gaming will probably still be popular in three years, but there's no way of guessing whether we'll still be playing Angry Birds.

Unlike traditional video games, where a Halo or Super Mario franchise can translate into decades of gaming, there's too short a history behind them to know if the types of games being put out by Rovio, Zynga and OMGPOP today will stay relevant in the medium term.

First things first, though. Keep an eye for the short animated clips later this year to determine if this franchise has wings in video form.

Motley Fool contributor Rick Munarriz does not own shares in any stocks in this article, except for Disney. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended buying shares of Walt Disney.

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RIM Makes a Step in the Right Direction

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It's a rare sight indeed: a good idea from Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM  ) . The BlackBerry maker doesn't have very much to brag about these days, as it continues to report disappointing earnings amid an exec exodus.

One of the few bright spots to come out of Waterloo recently was its BlackBerry Mobile Fusion mobile device management, or MDM, enterprise service. Mobile Fusion is geared toward corporate IT departments looking to manage a slew of various devices, notably including competing smartphone and tablet offerings from Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) Android and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL  ) iOS.

The service allows RIM to tap into one of the few remaining strengths it has left, enterprise security software, and apply it to the rising tide of Android and iOS. Gartner's figures for the fourth quarter showed RIM's market share slide from 14.6% to just 8.8% while Android and iOS combined jumped from 46.3% to a monstrous 74.7%.

Mobile Fusion has now officially launched today. It's a strange yet inevitable admission by RIM that it's losing traction in its enterprise and government fortresses that were once unassailable -- especially after RIM took so long swallowing its pride to replace its co-CEOs and co-chairmen when it was abundantly clear to everyone outside the company that the duo needed to go.

Source: RIM earnings releases.

Software and services have been steadily trending higher as a percentage of revenue. Plunging hardware sales surely contribute, but RIM should recognize where its strengths lie. New CEO Thorsten Heins seems to be aware of this, as he signaled that the company is considering software licensing as part of its potential turnaround strategy, which coincides with those Samsung rumors.

Hardware OEMs already have plenty of OS licensing choices without adding RIM to the mix, but RIM needs to do something posthaste if it has hopes for any type of turnaround, which is clearly what David Einhorn is banking on.

Focus on software and services, RIM. It's your best bet, and Mobile Fusion is at least a step in the right direction.

If RIM's going to pull off a turnaround, it's going to take a long time. In the meantime, there are better ways to capitalize on the mobile revolution. This report names a company that's powering the devices from the inside. Get the free report now.

The Steve Jobs Betrayal
You may already know that in the final year of his life, Jobs revealed a stunning betrayal ? and told his biographer, "I will spend my last dying breath... and every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank to right this wrong." What was it that made Jobs so irate ? and why could it make a few in-the-know investors some major profits over the coming months and years?

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