One of the last remaining glaciers in Brooklyn is getting ready for Labor Day weekend with a barbecue pit. Meet the team racing to move it, 40 pounds at a time.
Hailstone Ice (their 90-year-old glacier in Brooklyn is now Hailstone Ice) is busy every summer weekend, with employees posing on the sidewalk in front of a constant stream of backyard grillers, street vendors, snow cones. Scraper and water for one dollar. sellers. , event organizers served hot beer, a DJ needed dry ice for a smoky dance floor, Dunkin’ Donuts and Shake Shacks had problems with their ice machines, and a woman delivered a week’s worth of food to Burning Man.
But Labor Day is something else — “one last big hurray,” said Hailstone Ice owner William Lilly. This coincides with the West Indies America’s Day Parade and the pre-dawn J’ouvert music festival, which attracts millions of revelers, whatever the weather.
“Labor Day is 24 hours long,” Mr. Lilly said. “It’s been a tradition for as long as I can remember, 30-40 years.”
At 2 a.m. Monday, Mr. Lilly and his team — cousins, nephews, old friends and their families — will begin selling ice directly to hundreds of food vendors along the Eastern Boulevard parade route until the road is closed just after sunrise. dot. Their two vans were also forced to leave the country.
They spent the rest of the day walking back and forth from the glacier, selling 40-pound bags of ice on carts.
This is Mr. Lilly’s 28th Labor Day working at Glacier, which moved a block south on St. Mark’s Avenue six years ago. “I started working here on Labor Day in the summer of 1991,” he recalls. “They asked me to carry the bag.”
Since then, ice has become his mission. Mr. Lilly, known to his neighbors as “Me-Rock,” is a second-generation iceman and ice researcher. He studies how bartenders use his dry ice pellets to make smoldering cocktails and how hospitals use dry ice cubes for transportation and chemotherapy. He’s thinking about stocking up on the fancy, oversized cubes that all craft bartenders love; he already sells Klingbell crystal clear ice cubes for carving;
At one time he bought them from all the few ice factories in the three states that supplied the few remaining glaciers in the city. They sold him ice in bags and dry ice, cut with hammers and axes into granules or slabs of the required size.
Ask him about the New York City blackout of August 2003, and he’ll jump out of his office chair and tell you a story about police barricades outside warehouses that stretched to Albany Avenue. “We had so many people in that small space,” Mr. Lilly said. “It was almost a riot. I had two or three truckloads of ice because we knew it was going to be hot.”
He even told the story of a blackout in 1977, which he said happened the night he was born. His father was not in the hospital – he had to sell ice on Bergen Street.
“I love it,” Mr. Lilly said of his old career. “Ever since they put me on the podium, I couldn’t think about anything else.”
The platform was a raised space containing old-fashioned 300-pound blocks of ice, which Mr. Lilly learned to score and cut to size using only pliers and a pick.
“Brick work is a lost art; people don’t know what it is or how to use it,” said Dorian Alston, 43, a film producer who lives nearby who has worked with Lilly in the igloo since he was a child. Like many others, he stopped to hang out or offer help when needed.
When the Ice House was in its original location on Bergen Street, they carved out most of the block for many parties and it was a purpose built space that was originally called Palasciano Ice Company.
Mr. Lilly grew up across the street and his father began working at Palasciano when he was very young. When Tom Palasciano opened the place in 1929, small pieces of wood were cut daily and delivered to ice bins in front of the refrigerator.
“Tom got rich selling ice,” Mr. Lilly said. “My father taught me how to handle it and cut it and package it, but Tom sold ice—and he sold ice like it was going out of fashion.”
Mr. Lilly began this work when he was 14 years old. Later, when he ran the place, he said: “We hung out in the back until 2am – I had to force people to leave. There was always food and the grill was open. There was beer and cards.” games”.
At the time, Mr. Lilly had no interest in owning it—he was also a rapper, recording and performing. (The Me-Roc mixtape shows him standing in front of old ice.)
But when the land was sold in 2012 and the glacier was demolished to make way for an apartment building, a cousin encouraged him to continue his business.
So did James Gibbs, a friend who owned Imperial Bikers MC, a motorcycle club and community social club on the corner of St. Marks and Franklin avenues. He became Mr Lilley’s business partner, allowing him to turn the garage he owned behind the pub into a new ice house. (There’s also a business synergy, given that his bar uses a lot of ice.)
He opened Hailstone in 2014. The new store is slightly smaller and doesn’t have a loading dock or parking for card games and barbecues. But they managed it. A week before Labor Day, they set up the refrigerator and strategized how to fill the house with more than 50,000 pounds of ice by Sunday.
“We’ll push him right out the door,” Mr. Lilly assured the staff gathered on the sidewalk near the glacier. “We will put ice on the roof if necessary.”
Post time: Apr-20-2024
