Kensington Tour

Schmidt's Brewery - What's Left

This building, which has been here since 1920, used to house the main offices, the brewery and the bottling plant for the Schmidt’s Beer Company.  It employed literally thousands of people.  But when the label was sold, for millions of dollars, it began to lay workers off.  Over a period of three years more than 1400 workers lost their jobs at this plant, which moved to South Carolina.  And then the company closed down permanently.

The former owner of this property owes the city over $3.5 million in back taxes. Nothing has been done to collect those taxes or to make the owner take responsibility for demolishing this building. The building has just been left to fall apart - becoming an eyesore and more importantly, a threat to this community. Children go into the building to play.  Homeless people live in this building.  Its just a matter of time before someone is killed because of a collapsed ceiling or wall. Downtown or in the suburbs, something would be done, but sitting here year after year, it's just another reminder that people in Kensington don't really matter.

Despite this history of neglect, when a group of homeless families in the Kensington Welfare Rights Union decided to use part of the abandoned lot for a tent city, the police were out in force to prevent them doing so.  The director of KWRU and the President of the National Union of Hospital and Healthcare Employees were arrested for trespassing on the property while they were trying to clean up the garbage.  The city defended the interests of someone who owed $3.5 million dollars over the rights of the community to do something positive with the space.

We built that tent city with the Hospital Worker's Union because we know that when they go out on strike, it's welfare recipients and poor people that are pitted against them and used to take their jobs. In any case, literally half of this city block was lined up with police vans to arrest us, and we were arrested and went to jail for a couple days just because we were building encampments for homeless people and we had cleaned up a lot of the garbage off of the lot. This was during the Presidential Volunteer Summit, and that same week they brought hundreds of volunteers and spent thousands of dollars to clean graffiti off of the building. It seems a little ridiculous to promote volunteerism like that as a solution without a discussion of why the building is abandoned and the impact that's had on the community.

Next: Welfare Office: The Clock is Ticking