17th

Bermondsey and cities reinventing themselves

In the late 1870s Julius Kuttner was a regular in Racky's restaurant on 21 Frankfort Street, New York. This was the Swamp district of New York, the tanning centre since the 17th century. There he met Augustus Schultz, who also lunched there. Augustus Schultz had been born in Germany in 1833 and was working in New York as a chemist for Kuttroff and Pickhardt, a German dyestuff importer. The leather industry was about to change forever.