Historic Williamsburg Brewery Will Likely Make Way for New Development

The eye-catching Joseph Fallert Brewery complex on Williamsburg’s Meserole Street may soon meet the wrecking ball, likely to make way for an apartment complex.

City records show the new owner, Meserole Lorimer Realty LLC, applied for a demolition permit for the circa 1870s buildings at 56 Meserole Street, first reported by Crain’s. The permit is yet to be issued, and no new building permits have been applied for.

Meserole Lorimer Realty LLC purchased three lots that house the complex in January for $19.6 million. Cheskel Schwimmer of Chess Builders appears to be behind the LLC, signing for a mortgage.

The lots include the main brewery at 56 Meserole Street (made up of five buildings reaching four stories), a two-story residential building at 346 Lorimer Street, and a parking lot at 54 Meserole Street. Together, the lots give the new owner a 20,000-square-foot site on the corner of Meserole and Lorimer streets, already zoned for residential use. The brewery was marketed as a prime Williamsburg development site.

Records show Meserole Lorimer Realty LLC purchased the lots from the estate of Brooklyn property owner Gregory Pasternak, who passed away unexpectedly in 2024 owning numerous buildings in the borough. Pasternak, a Polish immigrant, was known for buying rundown buildings in North Brooklyn, fixing them up, and renting them out, often cheaply to artists.

Pasternak purchased the brewery buildings in 1996, records show, and he filed to convert them through adaptive reuse into a mixed-used building with 33 apartments in 2013. The permit was never issued.

The complex was built by the Joseph Fallert Brewing Company beginning in the late 1870s through the early 20th century, filings show. In January 1879 Fallert placed an announcement in the Brooklyn Daily Times that he would soon be ready to supply beer from his newly erected Meserole Street brewery. John Platte is listed in early filings as the architect for an 1878 ice house and an 1882 four-story brewery building, and later filings mention architects F. Wunder and Koch & Wagner.

Historic sketches, maps, and photos show that not all the original buildings survive today and some have changed significantly over the decades. There were once wood frame buildings on the property and a smokestack, tax photos show.

The brewery appears to have closed in the early 1920s amidst Prohibition and after the death of Fallert’s son, who took over the business after his father’s death.

The Pershing Warehouse Corp used the property in 1922, and the Roman Furniture Company used it in the 1930s

Once a prominent feature of Brooklyn’s architectural landscape, large brick brewery buildings are becoming a rarity. While some have been adaptively reused and turned into residential buildings or commercial spaces, many were razed to make way for larger new developments. While this is a trend the Joseph Fallert Brewery is likely to follow, no demolition permit has been filed yet for the elegant two-story residential building at 346 Lorimer Street.

Records show Schwimmer is behind a number of other new Brooklyn developments, including 2175 Bergen Street in Ocean Hill, a planned six-story building at 293 Wallabout Street in Williamsburg, and 2337 Bedford Avenue in Flatbush.

[Photos by Susan De Vries unless noted otherwise]

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