Many still remember the view of the Publicker Distillery while crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge and its billboards for Old Hickory Bourbon and other products.
Others remember how the 40-acre site on Delaware Avenue in Philadelphia became a polluted Superfund scandal after it closed in 1982.
In its heyday in the 1950s, it was one of the giants of the liquor industry with a plant in Scotland producing Inver House Scotch, named for owner Simon Neuman’s Radnor home, and was the world’s biggest buyer of Cuban molasses.
The company got into the booze business in 1933 with the end of Prohibition.
Fortune magazine ran a optimistic story at the time about how Harry Publicker — founder and Neuman’s father-in-law — was going to shake up the booze business by making drinkable whiskey without aging it. One supposes they were right. Here is the link.
