Seersuckered: Cobbs Creek Whiskey
June 26, 2012 § 1 Comment
This menacingly jovial Colonel Sanders-looking gentleman is hawking Cobbs Creek whiskey in this 1942 advertisement from Time.
Cobbs Creek whiskey was once a pretty bottom rail product of the Continental Distilling Company, a subsidiary of the Publicker alcohol and chemical company. Publicker and Continental were located on Delaware Avenue–Publicker just north of the Walt Whitman bridge and Continental close to Pier 70. There’s a bit of dissonance in the image of a slow-sipping southern gentleman pulling on a bit of well-aged cask conditioned whiskey and the way the product was really generated. As this excellent site points out, both Continental and Publicker were massive industries churning out humongous quantities of alcohols, solvents and, oh yes, environmental contamination. Throughout the 1980s as Publicker slowly crumbled, the riverside site became a veritable horror shop of exploding tanks, fires, oozing barrels and tanks–sometimes causing human casualties. A fire in 1987 essentially ended production and the site was consigned to the Superfund list.
Yikes! I wonder how the imbibers fared..