The Lemp Brewing Company’s huge brewery complex was auctioned on June 28, 1922, after Prohibition and the Eighteenth Amendment had virtually shut down the brewery. The company briefly tried producing a non-alcoholic brew called Cerva, but it used only a small part of the facility and was not profitable. William J. Lemp, president of the brewing company and grandson of its founder, decided to liquidate the operation, and the complex was sold in six units in the empty bottling house. Before Prohibition, the property had been valued at $7,000,000 and employed more than a thousand men, but the 1922 sale brought only $588,5000. International Shoe Company, then the nation’s largest shoe producer after merging with Peters Shoe Company and Roberts, Johnson and Rand, bought the first unit and eventually acquired the entire complex, using it as a supply depot and factories for shoe accessories such as boxes and laces. In 1966, after International Shoe became Interco, it began leasing space to individual companies, and Interco sold the 14 acres in 1992. The letters “ISCO” on the smokestack recall International Shoe Company’s seventy years of ownership.
