11/02/05 Swing Shift, notes from the field

Found a milk bottle from the clearing by the construction crew just below Battery Park landscape surface, which I read years ago, in Special Collections at Stony Brook University library, in a fiscal report of the NYC Parks Dept. filed in the 1850's, reported that Battery Park was made using prison labor. In the report, it also listed the exotic animals various sea captains had that year brought to Manhattan for the Central Park Zoo, (not Kong). It showed in a few small lithographs and drawings what the construction of Battery Park required, i.e. the filling, the walks, the short fences, etc., I think. Back to the milk bottle. One of the laborers with the contracted excavators told me his father worked for the "Sheffield" milk company that was embossed on the milk bottle they had exposed. He said it was once the Doug Schultz brewery at 156th and Barry streets in the South Bronx, (not far from where I once lived as a child, at 143rd St. and Third Ave.) In the Bronx, the milk plant was once a "gangsters" brewery, and it was turned into a milk plant using the same pipes, he said. His father worked for 46 years for them delivering milk.