Monthly Archives: December 2018

Party ice

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Tomorrow is the first day of winter. I can’t think of a better way to mark the transition than to cobble together a little post about ice.

Ice freezer, 7-11 store, Silver Spring, Maryland.

Party ice is the product you can buy in the freezers outside of convenience stores or inside supermarkets. This bulk ice product hails from a time before home refrigeration and convenience stores. Before mechanical refrigeration, ice was imported from New England and Canada to Mid-Atlantic and Southern states. At first, it traveled by boat; later, refrigerated rail cars carried the large blocks harvested from northern lakes and ponds.

In the Washington metropolitan area, ice arrived via the Potomac River. In the nineteenth century, large ice warehouses were built in Alexandria, Virginia, and Georgetown in the District. By the turn of the twentieth century, the ice industry had adapted to mechanical production methods and new transportation systems. Ice manufacturers began specializing production lines to meet demands from household consumers, businesses, and industry.

Party ice is a twentieth century product that originated in community ice distribution networks created by ice entrepreneurs. Ice was produced in plants and packaged for sale according to local health codes. In Alexandria, Virginia, the Mutual Ice Company dominated the industry. Founded in 1900 on the riverfront, the company eventually moved to the Potomac Yard rail yards where it built a large ice plant.

Mutual Ice Company logo.

The Mutual Ice Company produced bulk ice for sale to local Alexandria consumers and it iced railroad cars passing through the city that were filled with perishable freight: meat and vegetables. Consumers could get ice delivered to them or they could buy it at one of seven “ice stations” that the company built throughout the city. These operated between 1924 and 1955. After that, the company continued selling ice at its plant and in grocery store freezers until it stopped making ice in 1969.

Former Mutual Ice Company ice station (2008), Alexandria, Virginia. Photo by David Rotenstein.

Oliver Ashby Reardon obituary photo. Credit: Legacy.com.

In 2008, I interviewed O. Ashby Reardon (1928-2011). Reardon’s family had established an ice wharf in Alexandria in the 1850s and he was the Mutual Ice Company’s last president. He attended the U.S Naval Academy and served for eight years in the U.S. Navy. Reardon returned to Alexandria after being discharged and he began working in his family’s ice plant. Reardon served in several executive positions with the firm until it closed in 1969. The following year the company changed its name to Mico, Inc., and continued to do business as a holding company for several of the older firm’s subsidiary enterprises.

We spoke about a lot of things in the two interviews, including party ice. The Mutual Ice Company initially sold fifty- and twenty-five pound bags of ice at its plant while twelve-pound bags were sold in a dozen vending machines placed in small wood frame shelters built inside the plant and delivered to locations throughout the city. Self-serve ice chests, according to Ashby Reardon Jr., were “made by the Lear Company that were just sitting out there in front of an entrance to the gas station where you could go in and buy some ice and then take it out and put it in your car.” Continue reading →

Is the Purple Line a pig in a poke?

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Purple Line construction sign.

Some Montgomery County, Maryland, residents think they’ve been sold a pig in a poke as far as the Purple Line is concerned. Early on, they enthusiastically supported the 16-mile light rail project linking Langley Park and Bethesda. But after construction started and some of the short- and long-term impacts began appearing, their opinions changed.

Whether it’s the observant Jews who will lose a key walking route to synagogue or the homeowners whose new neighbors include piles of cut trees, trash, and vermin, one thing has become clear ever since construction began in 2017: the new light rail line has a bigger price tag than Maryland transportation officials told people during nearly 30 years of planning.

“Under any circumstances where construction is taking place, you have to expect a level of inconvenience for a window of time,” said Leslie Herrera, a Silver Spring resident whose house abuts the Purple Line corridor in Lyttonsville. Once a big Purple Line advocate, Herrera has soured on the project.

She cites the piles of cut trees, trash, and animals, and unresponsive Purple Line officials as the reasons. “I’ve been to all of the meetings but one and it’s generally the same. It’s generally the same. They say they’ll get back to you. You call, no answer. No call back,” she said while standing near a clear-cut lot next to her home.

Cut trees, debris piles, and trash in the Purple Line clearcut corridor behind homes along Pennsylvania Avenue in Silver Spring’s Lyttonsville neighborhood.

Continue reading →

Holy Holstein

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New York Times screen capture, December 2, 2018.

This terrific New York Times photo became a meme and went viral on the Interwebz. It shows what appears to be a gargantuan Holstein cow — Knickers — dwarfing an adult human.

The accompanying article is a funny piece that digs into the photo and how it’s misleading, i.e., folks who have never gotten up close and personal with a Holstein probably don’t know how big they are in real life. Most cityslickers’ only experiences with Holstein cattle come from Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream art, and the burgers we eat, They know very little about cattle and Holsteins in particular. The NYT article and the folks who know my “thing” with cattle who have shared the image reminded me that I haven’t written much lately about livestock and leather tanning. I think it’s time to fix that situation.

Pittsburgh History cover, Spring 1997 issue, featuring my article on the history of Pittsburghs leather industry.

I spent a lot of years researching and writing about tanning, stockyards, and the interconnected meatpacking and meat byproducts industries. While researching Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s tanneries in the mid-1990s I encountered one of those people whose names eerily fit the jobs they do. You know, Mr. Butcher the butcher. Or, Mr. Macro the math teacher. Here in the DC suburbs I always chuckled when I saw a Peed Plumbing truck.

This fun little post is about a Pittsburgh tannery owner named Alexander Holstein (1812-1895). Holstein came to Pittsburgh from Bavaria. He arrived in New York in 1836. Within a decade, he appeared in Pittsburgh city directories as a saddler and harness maker with a shop in Wood Street in the city’s downtown. Wood Street was near the confluence of the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela rivers. Its proximity to to the rivers and to the later Pennsylvania Canal made it an ideal location to become Pittsburgh’s earliest leather tanning district. Hides, tanbark, and water were easily obtained. The same transportation routes made it possible to ship the finished leather not sold locally to eastern markets. Continue reading →