Schneller and Son Brewery

In many ways I am a lazy bum. Matt, I'm sure, knows this - particularly because I tend to ride on his coattails when it comes to finding nice old buildings to photograph. My excuse is that I am not only relatively incompetent when it comes to that sort of research, but I am not feverishly driven to do it like... *cough* many people are.

I should talk about the Schneller Brewery. After all we spent a small amount of time there and I had many thoughts running through my head in the quiet. It's a nice little place, quite historic as breweries tend to be, and I should find it a little odd that of all the buildings I have seen over the years, breweries tend to be a category in and of themselves. The place is trashed, plain and simple. And it is so well-trashed that I couldn't even begin to guess how old the damage is. The business has been abandoned for over 4 decades so I hear, so there's a lot of room for speculation. The basement level was not quite as bad as the chop-shop we strolled into in Philadelphia last summer, thank god, but I wasn't left with a feeling of warmth and good cheer. It was dark (duh), filled with refuse, and stank like some sort of resin-derived product that reminded me of bow rosin. How odd: the spine-tingling hyper-awareness resulting from the guys pushing me to go in first co-mingling with thick memories of violin lessons in music school. Fear of being jumped makes an interesting sauce to stuffy soundproofed practice rooms, though the sweaty palms blurred the lines between past and present!


Traffic is quite loud in the brewery because there are very few windows left. On the outside it is lovely old red brick capped with green copper roof. Inside it is ruined and brown. The park across the street turns out to be a hot gathering place for some noisy locals and it's annoying to have to find alternate routes from the basement to the first floor because of them. We don't really want them seeing us and coming over because it certainly would not be in that "Hey whatcha guys doing and can we join ya?" kind of way.

The highlight of the evening was, to me, not the brewery but the place we visited afterwards. And even though none of my shots from that lovely second place turned out even half usable, I'm a year overdue for spilling those memories into a tangible medium....






... but that's not going to be happening right now, either.