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That’s an image captured in the Fernet Branca bottling facility on Desbrosses St. in lower Manhattan just south of Canal St. It was taken sometime in the 1990s.

The photo arrived in my inbox last week. It was among a group of images sent by a photographer named Ken Tannenbaum. He and his family lived in Tribeca back in the late 1990s and at some point, the Tribeca Trib (a local paper) asked him to take some photos of the space.

I don’t know what inspired him to search for other people who would remember the space. But somehow he found me.

Back in 1999, when I first broke out as a freelance writer, I landed one of my first gigs with the new management at the Fernet Branca space. I helped them to launch and publish a monthly print newsletter.

Fernet Branca was still a widely available product in the U.S. in the 1980s. In the 1930s, the brand was so popular here that the company opened the bottling facility.

But as I understand it, they continued to sell Fernet Branca as a medicine rather than as an alcoholic beverage.

If you talk to Italians and Italian-Americans of a certain age, they will tell you that they didn’t drink Fernet Branca to party. They “took” it when they felt under the weather. Many people, usually about 10-20 years older than me, have told me that their mothers gave them an espresso spiked with an egg yolk and a shot of Fernet Branca every morning.

In the 1980s, the FDA came down hard on the brand. Evidently, they had never re-registered it as an alcoholic beverage.

At some point during that decade, the U.S. government shut them down and they abandoned the facility.

When Fernet Branca called me in 2000, they were relaunching the brand and had seen something I had written about it.

They invited me to see the space. It was like a scene out of Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein.” Evidently, they just picked up and left and left everything behind.

The image above comes from the space’s counterfeit testing lab. Hence all the test tubes.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was heading to the Atlantic Avenue stop to catch the 2 train that would take me to the Fernet Branca space. Before I left my apartment, I called one of my colleagues to confirm a 9 a.m. meeting.

He screamed at me: “Are you fucking crazy? Turn on the TV!” And then he hung up.

I went upstairs to my landlord’s apartment and we watched — in absolute disbelief and absolute horror — as the second tower was struck by the plane.

Had I not called my colleague, I would have been traveling underneath the World Trade Center right around the time that the second plane hit.

I was extremely fortunate. I’ll never forget the singed documents that rained over Park Slope, Brooklyn that afternoon.

G-d bless everyone who lost their lives and suffered that day. G-d bless their families. G-d bless America.

Thanks for reading.