For the New Yorker of a certain age, the first sip was a rite after nursing: from mother’s milk to Manhattan Special. Those little glass bottles may as well have come with nipples.
And brother, what a sip. In today’s world of energy drinks and juices and endless vitamin boosters and ginger and ginseng, there is still nothing that resembles a cold Manhattan Special, a thick and fizzy, jet-black blend of espresso and seltzer topped off with a bracing wallop of pure cane sugar. It muscles its way around the mouth, making itself at home, before bounding down the throat like a big, goofy kid going to play in the basement.
The first sip was often the start of a lifetime of little glass bottles, for Manhattan Special, a hand grenade of caffeine and sugar, is nothing if not addictive. Generations of New Yorkers, especially Italians, grew up jittery as junkies on the stuff outside its big plant in Williamsburg, on the street that gave it its name, Manhattan Avenue.
“You’d almost think it was in the Bible, for God’s sake,” said Paul Botwin, a veteran of World War II and, later, the New York soda wars, working in the business and watching other local brands come and go. “The times passed them by. Coffee survived.”
The soda company is run by a sister and brother, Aurora Passaro, 44, and Louis Passaro, 43. The brother, a weightlifter, Kiss fan and action-figure collector, is as gregarious and outsize as his sister is proper and private. She runs the office, he oversees production.
They were born into the work, but cruelly thrust into their jobs in 1983, when they were still teenagers. That was the year Manhattan Special splashed in a different, awful way, across newspaper columns describing their father’s murder.
Now 113 years old, Manhattan Special seems to be caught between two worlds, or even four: past and future, New York City and the outside. While old-timers fondly recall the soda of their youth, the mention of Manhattan Special to the average 20- or 30-something New Yorker is often met with a blank stare. The little soda company from Brooklyn has largely slipped out of daily life in much of the city. Instead, the soda is finding its way along terrain unheard of back in the day, like specialty-food niches and online sales.
To that end, Ms. Passaro, the fourth generation of Passaros at the soda plant, spent three long days last week at the sprawling Fancy Food Show in Manhattan, in the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, standing and smiling and handing out samples alongside hundreds of purveyors of gourmet foods and far-flung delicacies. Behind her was a blowup of the bottle’s label, a Jazz Age couple dancing over a cup of espresso.
But walk outside the Javits into the summer heat, and a block or two away you could enter 17 corner delis and bodegas before you found one that carried Manhattan Special.
“It used to be ubiquitous,” said Joseph Terlato, a former Manhattan Special slurper in short pants in Bensonhurst, now an 81-year-old food retailer in Poughkeepsie, attending the food show. “Now, it’s in specialty shops.”
To spend a few days with the Passaros is to keep each foot in eras as separate as chalked squares on a hopscotch grid. At their food show booth, an electronic scanner reads bar codes on visitors’ name tags, downloading their names and contact information for future Manhattan Special mailings. Back at the plant, where horses and buggies once carried sodas packed in wood cases, workers strain at the big bottling machine in the back, a behemoth of steel and flaking paint on cinder blocks, through which every single bottle passes.
Manhattan Special was created by an Italian immigrant named Michael Garavuso, who dreamed up the soda with the help of Ms. Passaro’s great-grandmother, Dr. Teresa Cimino, an osteopath, and Mr. Garavuso’s friend, who treated people with bone deformations. Italians rejected American coffee for espresso, and both saw promise in a cold version for the summer months. “Since 1895,” later bottles read. “Gold Medal, Rome, 1925.” Mr. Garavuso shrewdly worked with an Irish bottler, instantly expanding his customer base.
Louis Passaro, Ms. Passaro’s grandfather, was in charge of distribution, eventually taking over the operation. In Passaro tradition, he put his son, Albert, to work. Albert liked to tell people he started at the top. The top of the delivery truck.
Albert took over in 1970, when his daughter, Aurora, was 7, and Louis was 6. “I live in a nice house,” he told Forbes magazine in 1982. “I know this business. What would I do? Go and lose my money someplace else?”
He was very proud of the product. “What celery soda was to the Jews,” he said in another interview, “Manhattan Special was to the Italians.” He expanded the selections beyond espresso, introducing fruit sodas. “Maybe I got into a can of worms,” he told Forbes.
Ms. Passaro started working at the plant at age 12, sweeping floors and making up the cardboard cartons that held the bottles. “My dad really took it to another level,” she said. Standing at her booth at the food show, where smiles and handshakes prevail, her eyes filled with tears. “He was the soul of the company, and we miss him very much.”
Albert Passaro and his wife, Angela, had separated, and Mr. Passaro remarried and moved to Woodhaven, Queens. On May 26, 1983, his second wife and their young child were upstate on vacation. He stayed home alone.
The police said his housekeeper found him. Ms. Passaro was 19, a college student still working at the plant. She was there when the call came, from Mr. Passaro’s neighbor, saying she should come to her father’s house. An employee picked her up and drove her.
“I got out of the car while it was still moving,” she said. “Everything just drained out of me.”
Albert Passaro had been shot dead in the basement. The police said his pockets had been turned out, and the home ransacked. Ms. Passaro went to Christ the King high school to tell her little brother. “She showed up with the undertaker,” he said.
And that was it. There was no question what would happen next. Aurora dropped out of school, never to return — “When did I have time for that?” — and they took over Manhattan Special.
“You always thought, ‘Hey, you don’t want to mess this up. It’s all you,’ ” Louis said. “It wasn’t easy for us. I’m not going to lie.”
The day after the killing, the headline in The New York Post read, “Soda King’s Murder Has Cops Stumped.” And it still does. The case remains unsolved. “Homicide cases never close,” Ms. Passaro said, although she said no one from the Police Department has called with news in years. A police spokesman said only that the case remains open.
Ms. Passaro is intensely protective of the business. She declined to discuss volume or sales figures, putting the number of units sold only “in the millions” per year. She first declined to allow a reporter and photographer to see the part of the plant where the soda is mixed, but then relented on the condition that no pictures would be taken.
The plant is a rich mix of old and new, like some weathered battleship refitted with shining parts. In the mixing area upstairs, the espresso beans are ground in batches — their scent seeping out into the neighborhood — and mixed in big tanks. Metal pipes flush soda through a fat hose to the bottling room below. A conveyer belt snakes along the tiled walls, and the glass bottles race through the stations: rinsing, filling, capping, labeling, casing.
Outside the plant, the neighborhood has changed. Young newcomers to the city have swarmed Williamsburg, seemingly oblivious of their old neighbor. “They smile, ‘Oh, coffee soda,’ ” Louis Passaro said with a shrug.
This month, Manhattan Special, for the first time, plans to sell sodas on its Web site. Ms. Passaro said she will ship cases anywhere in the continental United States. “It’s an opportunity for people who couldn’t get it to get it again,” Ms. Passaro said. She acknowledges that selling to aging boomers is hardly a growth strategy, but she and her brother said they were satisfied with their volume as it is.
Mr. Botwin, the soda wars veteran who occasionally helps out, said the plant is “running flat out” to meet summer demand.
Meanwhile, they ship wholesale batches around the world. It is not impossible that a person in the United Arab Emirates can buy a cold Manhattan Special. And traffic was brisk at the food show booth in Manhattan. Buyers from the Gourmet Garage chain and mom-and-pop boutiques around the region all scanned their name-tag information for Ms. Passaro.
Another question lingers over Manhattan Special. Both the Passaro siblings are childless, raising the likelihood that when they stop working there, it may be sold to someone outside the family.
“That’s a good question,” Ms. Passaro said.
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